


The Los Angeles Job

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Leverage Fusion, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-15 07:43:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7213723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rogue 1940s do-gooders Peggy and Daniel have been thorns in SSR agent Jack Thompson's side for his entire career, even as he's drawn deeper into political corruption himself. When Jack's (least) favorite crimefighting duo takes on the Council of Nine and he's given orders to kill them, he's going to have to make the ultimate choice: do as he's told, or throw his lot in with theirs?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saiditallbefore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saiditallbefore/gifts).



> Thank you so much to my beta [sheron](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron) for helping me brainstorm the characters' alternate postwar lives, characterization troubleshooting, and working out plot issues. YOU ROCK.

_**I'm Peggy Carter. During the war, I fought side-by-side with Captain America. But in peacetime, no one was interested in hiring a female agent. The SSR and British Intelligence both turned me away. So I struck out on my own. Even if I am not wanted as an agent, I will still do my best to protect the public interest domestically and abroad ...** _

_**... in my own way.** _

* * *

Under low, sulfur-bellied clouds, the lights of Manhattan glittered across the riffled water of the East River. Peggy crouched on the roof of a dockside warehouse, the wind stirring her hair. On this chill night in November, she was glad of the warmth of her dark brown leather jacket -- a souvenir of the war that she often wore on night missions.

Daniel arrived at her shoulder from the other side of the roof, the tip of his crutch barely making a click; he'd learned a lot about moving silently. 

"That's definitely the Winter Star at the dock down there," she whispered, lowering her binoculars, as he leaned close. "The Costa outfit's intel didn't lead us wrong."

"They're good at what they do, and that's not just the remnants of Costa loyalty talking. Any sign of Underwood?"

"Not yet, though she may already be down there."

"Let's hope not," Daniel said quietly. "I came over here to tell you we got company."

Peggy looked up. "What sort of company?"

"Cars. Guys." Daniel gestured her over to the far edge of the roof.

"Oh, what _now_ ," Peggy sighed, following him around a roof-mounted ventilation unit. "Is one of the outfits involved? Did someone tip off the police?"

"Don't know. It's not the Costa gang, that's all I can tell you. I don't recognize anybody down there."

"Oh, I do," Peggy said, with a blend of annoyance and amusement, as she caught sight of a familiar head of blond hair glinting under the single light illuminating the dock parking lot, as its owner exited one of the black cars before clapping a hat on his head. She handed her binoculars to Daniel.

"Well, if it isn't the golden boy of the SSR himself," Daniel murmured, passing the binoculars back to her after a long look. "Change of plans?"

"No, we can work around Jack Thompson, if we must. And it appears we must."

It wasn't the first time Thompson had shown up in the middle of one of their operations. Peggy appreciated a good adversary, and since she'd gone freelance and started having to dodge the law, Jack and the SSR were proving to be the biggest thorn in her side. Life would have been simpler -- but, she thought, much less interesting -- if the SSR were staffed by bungling incompetents.

"I know that look," Daniel sighed.

"What look? I don't have a look."

"Yes, you do. You _love_ going up against the SSR. You like the challenge, and if I didn't know better I'd think you were holding a grudge about their failure to hire you."

"It _is_ satisfying to repeatedly force them to come to terms with their poor judgment," Peggy had to admit. Or the previous chief's poor judgment, to be accurate. She had never quite forgiven the man, but she had sent flowers to his funeral, and a large envelope of Stark money had arrived at his widow's house the very next day. Jack Thompson, though ... where Dooley had generally ignored them unless they crossed him, Jack seemed to have made catching them his mission in life. It was highly entertaining.

"Well, you may be disappointed this time," Daniel said softly as the SSR men, under Thompson's direction, spread out along the docks, safely on the far side of the warehouse from the boat _they_ were interested in. "Doesn't look like they're here for us. Or else whoever tipped them off misdirected them on purpose."

"We'd best get moving before they work their way around to --" Peggy broke off and put the binoculars to her eyes. That quick flicker of movement in the deep shadows beside the row of warehouses was gone now, but she was confident of what she thought she'd seen. "I believe I just saw Dottie. Let's move."

Daniel hung back. "It's likely I'll just slow you down. I can cover the --"

"We are a team, Daniel. Besides, you sell yourself short. I've seen you in a fight. And I can use a steady gun hand at my back." She gave him a quick kiss. "Now let's go, before she has a chance to search the entire boat."

They retraced their route to the ground via a precarious system of ladders teetering on shed roofs, Peggy giving Daniel a hand where necessary. On the far side of the warehouse, the sound of clattering footsteps and terse male voices could be heard, but for now the SSR activity was all over there, and not over here, where a boat full of Nazi-stolen artwork and a rogue Leviathan agent awaited them.

"Admit it," Peggy murmured to Daniel as they crept along the dockside, attempting to stay out of the sight of both the SSR and any Leviathan agents who might also be creeping about. "This is a good deal more interesting than cooking books for the Costas."

"More exciting, certainly," Daniel muttered back. "Strangely enough, I worked for the mob for months without anyone ever pointing a gun at me. It seems to happen every day now that I'm working with you, and twice on Sundays."

"Shall we make a wager?" she returned. "I predict we can make it through the entire evening without a single weapon pointed in our direction."

"With Dottie on the loose _and_ the feds crawling around? This is a bet I can hardly lose. What'll you put on that, a nickel?"

Peggy winked at him. "Take the bet and find out."

She was rewarded with a gratifying blush. Brushing his fingers lightly with her own, she then slipped her hand beneath her jacket to draw her weapon, and stepped quietly onto the deck of the Winter Star.

There appeared to be no guard, an ominous sign, all the more so when she glimpsed a pair of shoes sticking out from under a pile of rope. Peggy leaned down to move the heavy coil of rope, but when she saw the man's staring eyes and bashed-in skull, she realized there was no need to check for a pulse. Dottie didn't like to leave witnesses behind.

"Rethinking that wager yet?" Daniel whispered, coming up behind her.

Peggy motioned him to silence and took the lead. There was a thin gleam of light around the door leading down to the cargo hold, not bright but visible enough to her dark-adapted eyes. With her gun in one hand, she carefully eased the door open a crack to peek inside.

A short flight of steps led down into the hold, which was illuminated by a hissing lantern sitting atop one of the crates. The contents of the hold, a smuggler's cargo of Nazi war trophies, were boxed up tidily, and there was no sign of either Dottie or whatever she might have been searching for. The lantern, however, was a clear indication that she was around.

"Cover me," Peggy whispered, and crept down the stairs, gun in hand. In the flickering lantern light, the cargo hold was filled with ink-black shadows, any of which could have concealed Dottie with a gun. A couple of the crates, she saw now, had been cracked open, mostly the painting-shaped ones. Whatever Dottie was looking for, it was either a piece of artwork, or something small enough to be concealed in one --

"Peggy, look out!"

At Daniel's warning, Peggy sprang out of the way of a toppling stack of crates. They crashed and splintered across the floor where she'd just been standing, spilling a cascade of heavy silver plates.

"Now look what you made me do, Peggy," Dottie said, coming out of the darkness with a karate chop at Peggy's wrist. Peggy managed to evade the full strength of the blow, which would probably have broken her wrist, but she lost her grip on her gun. It skittered off into the darkness.

"Don't move, Underwood," Daniel snapped from the stairs, trying to get a clear angle on her with his gun.

"Oh no, I'm quaking." Dottie ducked behind another stack of crates and shoved the top one, sending it flying at Peggy and forcing her to dodge aside.

There was no way to easily find her gun in all those dark shadows, so Peggy picked up a crated painting, sending a mental apology to its owner, and swung it just as Dottie drew _her_ gun. Peggy delivered a sound smack to the barrel and sent it sailing off to be lost somewhere in the shadows.

"Not that this hasn't been fun, but I must go." Dottie hurled a silver candlestick at Peggy's head. Peggy ducked, but it gave Dottie the opening she needed to dash for the stairs. 

"Daniel, she's coming your way!"

Daniel fired his gun, but Dottie had already grabbed an exposed pipe on the low ceiling of the cargo hold, using it to hoist herself off the floor and swing her legs at him. The shot missed and Dottie piled into him. There was a brief scuffle on the stairs, but by the time Peggy got there, Daniel was down and Dottie was escaping into the night.

"Sorry," Daniel said ruefully as she helped him up. "Some backup."

"I didn't manage to take her either." Something glinted at her feet, and Peggy scooped it up: some kind of long silver pin with an ornate head. She stuffed it into her pocket for further examination later. "You did make her drop this. It might have been what she came for. Do you see my gun anywhere?"

Daniel shook his head and held his out, butt first.

"No, keep it. You shoot as well as I do. Cover me."

Peggy clattered up the stairs, then stopped and peeked out cautiously to make sure she wasn't about to be brained with a boathook. There was no sign of Dottie on deck ... which didn't mean she was gone. With Daniel at her back, Peggy cautiously exited the hold. That shot might have drawn attention; they needed to move quickly. If she could only figure out where --

"SSR! You're under arrest!"

Great.

Daniel's hands shot up -- his free hand, anyway, the one unencumbered by the crutch -- but Peggy didn't even bother raising hers. "Arrest us later, Jack, we're busy."

"Busy committing some crime, no doubt." Jack Thompson sauntered out of the shadows in front of the boat's cabin, gun trained on them. "You two do that?" He nodded to the dead thug's body, his face grim.

"You know us better than that," Peggy retorted. "There is a Leviathan agent on this vessel, if she isn't long gone by now. I suggest you help us."

"I suggest you show me your hands and drop any weapons you may be carrying." Though he did take a quick look around; he was no fool. Wherever Dottie was, though, she wasn't visible. 

"Don't put your gun down, Daniel," Peggy told him as he started to bend over to set it on the deck. "We are really in a hurry, Jack."

"No, you're in the process of being arrested. You've been busy lately, all right -- busy annoying powerful people and making my life difficult. The break-in at Roxxon last month was you two, wasn't it?"

"Roxxon?" Daniel asked innocently. "Never heard of it."

"Oh, except in the newspapers, of course," Peggy chimed in. "All those doctored safety inspection reports and coverup of worker health complaints. It's truly shameful what the wealthy expect to get away with nowadays, isn't it?"

Jack snorted. "That's one way to describe it. Of course, now the whole company is teetering on the brink of collapse, which will mean all those workers will be out of jobs. Is that what you wanted, to destabilize the American economy and throw us back into the Thirties?"

"One company's failure will hardly do that," Peggy said tartly. "Besides, don't tell me you believe the 'poor me' tap-dance Hugh Jones has been doing for the benefit of the press. They can afford to clean up their safety practices and resume operations."

"Whether or not that's true, Carter, you two can't go around breaking the law with your two-person vigilante show and expect not to get caught."

"Breaking the law? Like Jones and his cronies have been doing for years?" Daniel asked. "Or did the fat stacks of cash they've been passing you help soothe the sting of having to watch them?"

Peggy was intrigued to watch a complicated mix of emotions flicker across Jack's face -- anger and guilt among them -- before the smooth mask slid back into place. "Yeah, well, let's not forget who's got the advantage here. Put the gun down, turn around, and let me cuff --"

"Down!" Peggy snapped, catching a glint in the shadows. She lunged at Jack, had a split second's fear as she saw his finger tighten on the trigger -- but he didn't fire, and she pulled him off his feet just as a crowbar swung through the space his head had just occupied. 

As Dottie sidestepped with a dancer's grace to recover her balance, Daniel fired at her. This time he scored a hit; she gasped and stumbled, but spun around and swung the crowbar. She clipped Daniel in the side of the head. He crumpled; the crutch clattered to the deck and Daniel folded bonelessly over the railing, vanishing into the narrow gap of dark water between the boat and the dock.

Dottie dropped the crowbar and vaulted over the railing in a tremendous leap, while Jack fired after her. She stumbled when she landed on the dock—she was definitely wounded—but recovered and sprinted into the shadows.

It had all happened in the space of seconds. "Daniel!" Peggy cried, her blood turning to ice in her veins. She lunged for the railing.

"I've got this," Jack snapped at her, stripping off his overcoat and shoulder holster.

She had only an instant to make the choice. As Jack leaped over the side, she decided to trust him, snatched up his sidearm, and followed Dottie instead.

It wasn't hard to trail her; all Peggy had to do was follow the spots of blood. The trail led her between two warehouses. The blood spots seemed to be getting closer together.

_I hope that bullet went deep. If she killed Daniel, I'll kill HER --_

Or .... maybe it was a trap ...

She looked up just as Dottie dropped on her from a fire escape. Peggy got off a single shot before Dottie was on her.

But this time Peggy wasn't caught off guard. They fought in silence and with a vicious seriousness. The only sounds were the women's soft grunts and gasps as they dodged each other's swings or staggered from blows that struck home.

And Dottie definitely was hurt; she might have been feigning slightly to draw Peggy in, but that spreading red stain on her side wasn't stage makeup. Peggy got the drop on her at last, slamming her into the wall and sending her to the ground with a hard blow on the back of her neck. Panting, she stood over Dottie's sprawled body and prodded her a couple of times to be sure she was really out, before locating the dropped gun and picking it up.

Now what? She knew from experience how slippery Dottie could be. Just tying her up wouldn't do, at least not for long ...

An idea occurred to her then, and Peggy smiled grimly.

A few minutes later, mission accomplished, she hurried back to the Winter Star. Fear clenched in her chest at the idea of what she might find there. But none of her nightmares materialized. From the shadows at the dockside, she saw the two men on the deck in a tableau: Daniel slumped and bedraggled, with water streaming off him, and Jack crouched next to him. Peggy noted a couple of interesting things, first of all that Daniel was handcuffed to the railing, and second, that the dry trenchcoat which Jack had shed before jumping into the water was now wrapped around Daniel's shoulders.

She smiled and leaped lightly to the deck of the boat, with Jack's gun dangling from her hand. Jack rose quickly from his crouch, holding ready the crowbar that Dottie had abandoned.

"Do watch where you're pointing that thing." Peggy tucked Jack's gun into the waistband of her slacks and knelt beside Daniel. 

Jack stood awkwardly, crowbar in hand, dripping. He looked at the gun, and at her, and seemed to be trying to decide whether wrestling it away from her was worth it. "Can I have my gun back?" he finally asked.

"May I have the handcuff key?" Peggy asked absently while checking Daniel's pulse and looking into his eyes. He seemed dazed and disoriented, and his lips were blue; the water trickling down his neck was streaked with blood. He roused enough to move his head away, with a wince, when she tried to probe at the bruised welt on his temple under his hairline. 

"No," Jack said. "Because you're both under arrest."

Peggy looked up at him. "How would you like to come out of this evening with a win, Jack?"

"I consider arresting you two a win, yes. Definitely."

Peggy decided to charitably ignore that, since he had, after all, saved Daniel's life. "This boat we're standing on is full of smuggled Nazi items. You should be looking at a commendation for this alone."

"I _know,"_ Jack said impatiently. "And I found it on my own, with no help from the two of you --"

"Don't you want to know where Dottie is?"

He broke off in mid-protest. "Did you catch her?" he asked, leaning closer with the crowbar held in a way that indicated it could be very quickly raised if Peggy tried anything.

"She's tied up not too far away. I'll very happily let you know where she is, under one condition."

Jack nodded, his mouth screwed up in a way that seemed to indicate he was on the verge of either smiling or yelling, or both. "I imagine that your condition involves letting the two of you go."

"Oh, that was going to happen anyway," Peggy said. She leaned against Daniel's shoulder, looking up at Jack. "The question is whether you want to do it the easy way or the hard way."

"First give me my gun. Then we'll talk."

"I have a better idea." While they talked, she'd been quietly picking Daniel's handcuff. Now she spun around and slapped the open end of the cuff onto Jack's wrist. At the same time, she seized the business end of the crowbar and yanked it out of his hand in his moment of distraction.

"Hey!" The look on his face was priceless.

"I did say we could do it the easy way or the hard way."

"I hadn't decided yet!"

Peggy dragged Daniel quickly down the rail before Jack got any ideas about trying to grapple with them. He was too busy grappling with the cuff instead. She hesitated, and then darted back to kiss Jack quickly on the cheek. He had a day's worth of stubble, rough against her lips.

Jack stared at her and tried to grab her, but he only had one hand free to do it with, and she broke his hold with a block that one of her SOE instructors had taught her and eeled quickly away. She dropped the crowbar just out of Jack's reach -- he could probably hook it with a shoelace if he put his mind to it -- and then slid a shoulder under Daniel's arm and helped him to his feet.

"Next time I'm letting you drown!" Jack yelled after them.

"We'll leave you a clue to Dottie's whereabouts in your car," Peggy called back. She snatched up Daniel's crutch in passing, where it had been dropped along the rail. 

"He'll have that off in a minute," Daniel said blearily as she helped him away, leaning heavily on the crutch and on her. "He has the key, you know."

"Not anymore. He appears to have unwisely stored it in his coat pocket." She patted the pocket of the slightly-too-long trenchcoat which Daniel was still wearing. "Oh, along with his wallet, it seems."

"You're both under arrest!" Jack yelled down from the boat.

"You have to catch us first!" Peggy called. She paused to take Jack's gun from her waistband and lay it down on the dock, in plain sight, followed by the wallet. Then, supporting Daniel, she hurried into the shadows.

"Where'd you leave Dottie?" Daniel asked weakly, leaning on her shoulder.

"In Thompson's car." And it had been quite a trick getting her in without being spotted, as that part of the docks was still crawling with SSR agents. She was rather proud of herself.

"Pretty big clue."

"No point in making the man work too hard. He did save your life after all."

Their getaway car was still where they'd left it, in an inky pool of shadows beside a rubbish tip. She deposited Daniel in a crumpled heap in the backseat and slid into the front. As she pulled away from the docks with no sign of pursuit, she began to relax. She motored quietly out to the main road with the headlights off, flicking them on as she pulled onto the night-quiet boulevard.

Daniel was quiet in the back. After driving for a few minutes, Peggy pulled off in a vacant lot. Their car was usefully anonymous in the dark, and there was no sign of pursuit. She opened the driver's door and stepped out into the chill night.

Daniel stirred when she slid into the backseat with him. "What's wrong?" he asked in a drowsy voice.

"Nothing's wrong. Let me look at your head."

"You already did," he complained, but submitted to being prodded and having her shine a flashlight in his eyes. His hair was still damp and matted with blood, and he smelled like a sewer.

"That river is not clean," Peggy murmured, reaching under the seat for their first-aid kit. She'd gotten her hands on an entire stash of surplus military ones; they turned out to be quite useful for two people who usually couldn't rely on regular hospitals.

"The East River? Gosh, really?"

"This is going to hurt," she told him, pouring iodine onto a clean rag.

" _Ow._ I hope you kicked Dottie in the head for me. I think I definitively won our wager, by the way." He huddled in Jack's coat as she held him in what amounted to a headlock while firmly blotting at his temple. "What's that -- ow! where did you learn first aid, veterinary school? -- that thing you found on the boat, anyway? Did you get a better look at it?"

"I don't know." She released him, having got the wound as clean as she could get it without sticking him in a shower, and took it from her pocket and gave it to him. 

"All those expensive items, and all she wanted was this." He turned it over between his fingers. "Any idea what she might have wanted it for?"

"No, but Howard might have some thoughts. I'd like to show it to him."

"Isn't he out in California?"

"He is," she agreed, snapping the first-aid case closed. "But I think it might be a good idea to experience a change of coast. Let the heat die down here. This is the third time we've almost been arrested in as many months. The SSR will be busy with their confiscated war loot and their new prisoner to interrogate, so this might be a good time to skip town."

"From what I hear, the SSR might be setting up a bureau in L.A. We might not get as far away from them as you're hoping."

"Well, I suppose we'll simply have to deal with that as it comes." She smiled. "Perhaps they'll send Jack to arrest us again, and we can give him his coat back."

Daniel plucked at the hem, crumpled under him on the seat. "Bastard saved my life," he muttered.

"I know." Everything had happened so fast; she hadn't had time to think. Had Jack not been there, she'd have gone into the water after Daniel in a heartbeat. But he _had_ been there, and he'd acted faster than she had. And she hadn't even hesitated to leave Daniel in his hands while pursuing Dottie. In that moment when the decision had to be made, she'd had no doubts.

Daniel glanced up from his contemplation of the coat. "Did you really have to kiss him, though?"

"Jealous?" she teased. Her lips still tingled from the burn of Jack's stubble.

There was a silence, and then, avoiding her eyes, Daniel murmured, "More like conflicted." He refused to explain what he meant.


	2. Chapter 2

_**Three months later** _

 

The house was nice. In New York, Jack had gone from a decent but small apartment, paid for on an SSR agent's salary, to a pretty swanky townhouse once he began to learn to play the game -- Vernon's game, the only game that mattered.

"Think of it as a job perk," Vernon had said when he pressed the key into Jack's hand.

Here, Jack got a house. Upstairs, downstairs, three bedrooms. You couldn't get a place like this in New York, not without one hell of a drive to get anywhere. Here in California, these bungalows were springing up all over in the wake of the war, conveniently close to shopping and offices.

As with the townhouse, rent wasn't mentioned.

And as with the townhouse, it was a nice-looking place to sleep, and nothing more. He was going to rattle around in here like a pea in a too-large pod. Irrationally, he missed the apartment -- it had been _his_ , in a way neither of the other places had been, paid for with money he'd earned ...

_At a job that Vernon gave me ..._

Ridiculous. He'd worked hard for that job. He'd worked hard for _this._ If he was enjoying the well-earned fruits of his hard work now, it was only what he deserved.

Jack swirled whiskey in a half-full glass and looked around the tastefully furnished living room. There were few boxes from the move; he hadn't had much _to_ move, something he hadn't understood about himself until packing up to relocate across the country and realizing there was almost nothing he wanted to keep. Anything he owned in New York could be bought again in California. He had no particular attachment to any of it, any more than he had to the townhouse or to this house. It was all just stuff, and money was no object now. Vernon made sure that people close to him were rewarded. 

He took a long slug of the whiskey.

So here he was, living in fucking California.

His new job as chief of the West Coast SSR had been presented to him as a promotion, a stepping stone to better things. The New York SSR bureau had been left in the semi-capable hands of one of Vernon's other hand-picked men, stepping into Jack's old position as New York's bureau chief, while Jack went out to L.A. to make sure that the new office was set up according to the Council's specifications ... and to deal with certain issues that had begun to arise regarding that same powerful circle of Vernon's friends.

Jack's eye dropped to the file folders on the coffee table, spread out in a neat arc.

He took a long breath, finished the whiskey, and poured another glass.

 _Dial it down, Thompson._ Vernon would be over this evening -- was supposed to show up anytime, in fact. It definitely would not give the right impression if Jack answered the door half drunk.

_You wanted this, remember?_

This was the life he'd dreamed of. He'd _known,_ even when he was a kid, that you couldn't climb the ladder without being willing to step on a few people. It was how things were done. Ever since the war, his life had been falling into place, one piece at a time. The war and all its skeletons were buried, and all he had to do was _play the fucking game._ So what if it was hard? Maybe it was hard for everybody --

_\-- or maybe I'm a coward --_

\-- but the point was, if he couldn't do it, Vernon would find someone else who could, and Jack would join the ranks of the unfit and the incapable ... the people who got trampled underfoot.

He hadn't come this far and done all the things he'd done to fail now. No matter what.

He flicked the edge of one of the file folders with his finger. Why did those two idiots have to bring themselves to the Council's attention? Why couldn't they have stuck to making his life difficult in New York?

There was a brisk knock at the door. Jack set the glass down on a side table and went to open it, sliding a practiced, welcoming smile into place.

"Vernon. Come on in."

"So how's California treating you so far?" Vernon asked as he stepped in and took off his hat. "How's the new place?" 

"Love it. Anything's an improvement over New York in February, though. Thirty degrees and snowing when I left."

Vernon winked. "Find the present yet?"

"Present?" Jack asked, baffled. _What, you mean the entire HOUSE?_ he almost said, but he wasn't quite drunk enough for that.

"Brand-new set of golf clubs in the hall closet. There's a course right down the street. You can't beat California for golfing weather."

Jack hadn't even bothered looking through any of the rooms, aside from unpacking his things in the master bedroom. "That was you, huh? Can't wait to start practicing my swing." He reached for the bottle on the sideboard. "Drink?"

"Don't mind if I do." Vernon accepted two fingers of whiskey, and Jack topped up his own glass. "Anyway, to business. Thanks for meeting me after hours."

"I'm an SSR man. I'm on duty twenty-four/seven." Jack sat down and laid a hand on the top folder. He couldn't justify (and hoped Vernon didn't notice) his slight hesitation before he opened it and slid it across the coffee table. 

Vernon took it, but his eyes were mainly on Jack.

"Daniel Sousa," Jack began. "Former, and possibly current, mob accountant. Working-class kid, went overseas like everybody else did, got his leg shot off at Bastogne. Came back a big war hero who couldn't get a job anywhere. He even applied to the SSR." Like they would've hired a guy with one leg. It had been before Jack's tenure as chief; he'd only found out when he started poking into Sousa's past. 

He tried not to remember swimming down in the dark water, catching hold of Sousa's collar with numb fingers -- tried not to think about the panic, and the sheer, irrational relief when Sousa coughed and started gasping in his arms as Jack dragged both of them back onto the deck of the Winter Star.

"Sousa grew up in a Jersey tenement," he said, pushing the memories away. "You know how those neighborhoods can be. Half the families have ties to the gangs one way or another, and it turns out his old man's got friends who have friends. Before you know it, he's taking filing classes at night and working in the payroll department of Costa & Martins Shipping. Crooked as a three-dollar bill ... like there's a construction or shipping company in the Tri-State area that isn't."

Vernon snorted.

"We've tried talking to them, but they claim he's not working there anymore, and that's all they'll say on the matter of Daniel Sousa. He's not the brains of the operation, though." Jack turned to the other folder. "Now here's the interesting one. Carter, Margaret Elizabeth." The photograph of Carter clipped to the inside of the folder stared back at him with fierce, defiant eyes. He found himself wanting to duck that level stare; even in a photo, it seemed to penetrate too deeply. "She's British. Good family, good grades, basically a Girl Scout. SOE recruited her for intelligence work during the war. I can only get access to a fraction of it, even at my level. You might be able to find out more. Seems like she was involved in some high-level stuff, though. She did resistance work all over Europe, and consulted with the SSR. Worked with Captain America himself." There were rumors that more than work had gone on between the two of them, but Jack decided not to open that can of worms. He told himself it was irrelevant to the situation anyway. "Then the war's over, and the SOE _and_ the SSR drop her like tainted goods. Who's gonna want a woman agent in a peacetime agency? So she goes rogue." 

And he'd had plenty of opportunity to reflect, over the last year, on just how much of a mistake they'd made. Not that he didn't understand why the British and U.S. intelligence agencies had made that choice; he wouldn't have taken a risk on a woman agent, either. At least not then. But after trying to catch the woman for a year, he wasn't sure if a single man in his stable of agents could match Peggy Carter's intelligence, determination, and courage. Not that he was about to admit it, of course, to Vernon or anyone else.

Sometimes he could still feel her lips press against his cheek, right at the corner of his mouth ...

"Communist, do you think?" Vernon asked, idly turning pages in Carter's folder. 

"We still don't know who's paying her," Jack said, although even as he said it, unease stabbed at him. There was no evidence Carter was getting paid off for any of the things she'd been doing. There was also no evidence that she was collaborating with the country's enemies. On the surface, it looked like she was sincerely out to fix the world, one corrupt company or escaped enemy agent at a time. Surely no one could be that naive, could they? It had to be a cover for something. "She's still well connected, on both sides of the law. We've caught her red-handed working with the mafia; it seems to be how she met Sousa in the first place. And she's a known associate of Howard Stark's."

"Stark, eh. I'm not surprised."

"Yeah, me neither." Stark, who to Jack's anger had been cleared of wrongdoing last year -- and, though Jack couldn't prove it, he sensed Carter's meddling fingers in that situation, too. Especially since ... "We think Stark's bankrolling her. If we can prove it, we can finally nail that slippery bastard for _something_ , at least." 

Vernon waved a hand. "Don't worry about Stark. He's a blowhard and womanizer, but not a major concern. This woman, though ..." He tapped Carter's picture. "She's ruffling a lot of feathers, Jack. Rocking some serious boats. She may even have been involved with the Roxxon break-in last year. Hugh Jones is still trying to clean up that mess."

"We don't have any evidence she was involved, sir."

"Nevertheless, Roxxon may be nothing but the tip of the iceberg of a very tall iceberg if she keeps this up." Vernon looked at him over the file folder, and his eyes cut like a knife. "You need to stop her."

"I can make it a priority, redirect some men and resources. We may not have enough to arrest Stark, but this is probable cause for a warrant to search his properties. If she is in California now, we'll have her behind bars—"

"No," Vernon said sharply. "I don't mean taking care of her through official channels. Don't play the fool, Jack. This woman is a threat. Both she and Sousa are playing pieces that need to be taken off the board, permanently."

Some part of him had known, as Vernon's little "assignments" escalated, that someday it was going to come to this. _Everybody else can play the game; why can't you?_ Still, he wasn't prepared for his physical reaction to actually hearing the words. For a moment he thought he might be physically ill.

"We don't have to do that. Once she's behind bars, we can bury her so deep she'll never see the light of day."

"And give her a chance to tell her side? No. This needs to be cleaned up, and I'm not talking jail."

"It's an unnecessary risk," Jack argued.

"It's a _necessary_ risk. You don't think I brought you out here to hobnob with movie stars and sit on the beach, do you?" Vernon reached out and clasped Jack's shoulder, his hand closing like a vise. "The security of the nation is at stake, Jack, and you and I both know that sometimes, ugly things have to be done in the shadows to keep everyone safe. Men like us make those sacrifices so other people don't have to. You're one of the few people I can count on to do what needs to be done. Am I right?"

"You're right," Jack said, the words tasting like ashes in his mouth.

"Tell me it'll be done, Jack."

"It'll be done," he said, barely above a whisper.

Vernon let go, with a final, friendly clap on the shoulder, and tucked the files into his briefcase. "I went to bat for you, you know, when people above me had doubts about someone your age being trusted with the position of responsibility you hold. I believe you're destined for great things, but only if you're willing to play ball with the big boys."

"You know I am," Jack said quietly.

"Excellent." Vernon closed the briefcase with a snap. "Once this Carter mess is cleaned up, we'll talk about what might lie beyond the SSR for you. Great things, Jack. Great things."

They shook hands at the door. Jack wasn't sure how much of the smile was left on his face; he couldn't even tell anymore. After Vernon was gone, he hesitated and then locked the door.

He didn't want to be disturbed.

He took a full bottle of whiskey upstairs with him, and quietly, in his nice new house, drank himself into oblivion.


	3. Chapter 3

"I don't think you appreciate, sweetheart, that I have a conflict of interest in this particular situation."

"Mr. Manfredi, I don't need an entire army," Peggy snapped, tapping her toe. "I just need some guns and perhaps a few men for backup and distraction." For some reason she and Daniel seemed to go through weapons at an alarming rate, not to speak of hired thugs, who were turning out to be as unreliable as she'd always found to be true when working from the other side.

"Yeah, but from what I hear, you're gettin' in the way of Whitney Frost's interests, and that means you might be in my way too."

"Joe, be a pal," Howard called, without looking up from his workbench.

"Let me put it this way," Peggy suggested. "One of our current goals is to utterly scuttle Calvin Chadwick and his crooked political career. If we promise to do this without harming Whitney in any way, I can't think that would be anything but a bonus to you, would it?"

"Can you do that?" Manfredi wanted to know, glancing between them.

"She's an actress," Daniel said. "The scandal sheets follow her around all the time. Having her husband go down for corruption will probably be great for her career. She'll be front-page news for weeks."

An indecisive look settled on Manfredi's face. "No more Chadwick."

"After we're through with Chadwick, he won't be able to get elected as the city dogcatcher."

From there, it was a simple matter of hashing out details of the transaction. "I must admit," Peggy sighed after they'd seen Manfredi to the door, "life was much simpler when I could rely on the combined armies of several nations to lay down covering fire. Howard, how is your bugging apparatus coming along?"

"Perfectly, of course. I _am_ , after all, a genius." 

"As you never tire of reminding us."

Howard straightened up from his workbench with a metal button pinched between his fingers. "The Arena Club has sophisticated anti-bugging technology, but these little beauties should work much better than the ones you tried to install the other day. They have a much shorter range, which makes them harder to jam." He pointed to a small brown box on the table. "Once they're live, the recorder kicks on automatically whenever the bugs pick up sound. Install it somewhere nearby, and retrieve it in a couple of days with all the dirt you need."

"I could kiss you, Howard, but for the sake of our working relationship I'll refrain."

"You don't have to refrain," Howard suggested hopefully, before catching sight of the level look Daniel was giving him. "Right, then. Bugs, check. I've also got a couple of toys to help you break in. Sure you don't want to try another, so to speak, frontal assault?"

Peggy shook her head. "We appreciate your help distracting them with the girls the other day, but I think we'll go in under cover of darkness this time. The more we learn of the Council and their activities, the more I think it would be best if we keep your involvement as secret as possible, especially once we begin to reveal the Arena Club's secrets to the press and the public. A wounded beast can do the most damage as it thrashes around in its death throes."

"Vivid metaphor, Peg." Howard picked up a magnetic gun with a flared muzzle and an exposed wire coil. "Take your own advice too," he added, tweaking the coils without looking up at her. "You might be flying under the radar now, but you can still get shot down."

With a slight smile that revealed none of the hurt behind it, Peggy said quietly, "Unlike you, some of us have no reputation left to lose. And we'll be careful."

 

***

 

Picking up Carter and Sousa's tail at the Stark mansion, Jack found, was easy enough. They were alert for a tail, but he was able to hang far enough back to avoid being noticed, since he had a feeling where they might be going. He knew he was right when they turned down the road that ran parallel to the one the Arena Club was on.

Through his binoculars, he watched them rendezvous with a couple of vaguely thuggish-looking individuals behind the Arena Club's neatly kept grounds. From here he could also see the security guards at the front gatehouse, reading the paper as the night shift passed slowly by.

Rocking boats and ruffling feathers.

In the trunk of his car, he had packed a roll of canvas and a shovel, all the while unable to believe that he was really doing this. Smear campaigns were one thing. As he'd risen through the ranks of Vernon's trusted associates, he'd slowly become aware that the Council could be very final about getting rid of its enemies, but he'd told himself ...

Told himself they got what was coming to them; told himself everything he had done, everything the Council did, was necessary for national security. Intelligence work was dirty business; he _knew_ that. Dark things went on where the public never saw it. Necessary things, to keep people safe, so Joe and Jane Ordinary-Citizen could sleep peacefully in their beds at night.

_And this?_ he thought, watching through the binoculars as Carter and Sousa parted ways from their hirelings. _Is this necessary?_

Behind the hedges guarding the back wall of the Arena Club grounds, Carter caught Sousa's arm and leaned close. Jack thought at first that she was whispering something to him, but then her lips met his, and for a moment they melted together.

A strange electric sensation went through him, coiling in his belly -- an odd mix of jealousy and arousal. They _were_ together. He'd suspected so, but hadn't put anything about it in his report to Vernon. It wasn't relevant, he told himself.

He watched through the binoculars for the duration of a long, long kiss, until they parted with soft nips at each other's lips -- and then Peggy cupped her hand behind Sousa's head and pulled it briefly to rest against hers, forehead to forehead. It was tender and intimate. Jack knew he should look away, but he couldn't.

Then there was a sudden commotion from the front gatehouse -- the two thugs, feigning drunkenness, had just driven their car into the gate. Peggy and Daniel broke apart, and Sousa clasped his hands together so Peggy could step into them, boosting her to the top of the wall.

Jack lowered the binoculars. He had some time now to set up an ambush. He'd seen where they parked their car. However long they took in the Arena Club, all he had to do was wait for them when they came out.

He reached for the flask in his pocket before he was entirely aware he was doing it, and took a sip to steady his nerves. Couldn't get too carried away, he told himself after a few swallows, and put the cap back on, tucking it away. He was going to need his wits about him.

After, though ...

He'd been drinking a lot lately. And he didn't really see it stopping anytime soon.

 

***

 

The break-in couldn't have gone more smoothly. The Arena Club wasn't completely deserted; even at this late hour, there were a handful of elderly men sipping martinis in the lounge. However, most of the place was empty. They'd planted bugs in the conference room, stashed the recorder in a back garden where it wouldn't be too difficult to retrieve, and then spent a couple of productive hours stealing incriminating files and stuffing Daniel's briefcase and Peggy's large satchel with them.

"The main question now," Peggy murmured as they made their way quietly back to the car through the shadows under the trees, "is whether it would be a better strategy to go straight to the press, or begin with a little judicious blackmail. The public approach worked on Hugh Jones because the best way to attack him is through his company, but some of these people are not going to be that easy to wound. If we could convince them it's in their best interests to turn on their colleagues, however --"

"Peggy," Daniel said softly, gripping her arm. She looked up from the file folder she was leafing through, with the satchel hung over her arm ... and down the barrel of a Colt revolver, as Jack stepped around the boot of their parked car.

"Oh really, Jack, this again?" Peggy returned the papers to the satchel before a couple of things began to sink in, such as the gloves he was wearing on this warm California night, and the strained, cold look on his face.

"Get in the car," Jack said. "We're goin' for a little ride."

Daniel dropped the briefcase and started to reach for his gun.

"No," Jack said sharply. He raised his weapon to point at Peggy's forehead. "Or the first bullet goes through her skull."

Daniel hesitated and slowly, very slowly, took his hand away from his gun. "The SSR doesn't know you're here, do they? Who'd the orders come down from? The Council? Masters?"

Jack didn't answer, but his face said it all.

"Oh, Jack," Peggy whispered. 

Her strongest, instinctive reaction was sympathy. She knew he was in the Council's pocket, but she'd been engaged in a cat-and-mouse chase with him for over a year, and she felt as if she'd gotten to know him reasonably well in that time. The impression she'd received was of a good agent and a man who, despite his flaws, was genuinely dedicated to upholding the law. Or at least he had been. Somewhere, underneath everything the Council had turned him into, there was a good man buried deep, the man who'd jumped into the river after Daniel without a hesitation. She still believed that man was there.

"Stop looking at me like that," Jack snapped, a flash of anguish surfacing in his eyes before it was hidden again. He took a menacing step toward them.

Daniel moved wordlessly to interpose his body between them. Peggy straight-armed him firmly out of the way.

"I don't think you'll do it," she said. "If you were going to, you would've shot us before we knew you were there."

"You have no idea," Jack said between his teeth, "what I'm capable of. No idea what I've done."

"Then shoot me," she returned. "Right here, right now. Between the eyes."

"Peggy!" Daniel protested.

"He won't do it." She set down the satchel carefully, and approached Jack one step at a time, not taking her eyes off him. His hand was shaking on the gun, making the barrel waver. "This isn't who you are, Jack."

"Don't come any closer," he snapped.

"You haven't shot me yet. Why not?" She closed her hand over the top of the gun's barrel. Jack closed his eyes briefly, wearing an expression of utter despair, as she took it out of his hand.

"Gonna kill me?" he asked quietly.

"Of course not, don't be absurd. Get in the back of the car."

His eyes snapped open. "What?"

"Peggy ..." Daniel began.

"Come on, quickly. We're much too close to the Arena Club to talk here." She tossed her satchel into the back, and jerked her head impatiently at the two men. They traded a brief look and then Daniel passed his briefcase into the back of the car, and Jack silently got in after it.

Peggy took the driver's seat. She kept Jack's gun.

"Are we killing him somewhere else and dumping the body?" Daniel whispered as he slid into the passenger side.

"I heard that," came from the backseat.

"Do you want to?" Peggy returned.

"Well ... not really ..."

"We're going to have a civilized discussion," Peggy informed them both. "And perhaps we can come to an agreement."


	4. Chapter 4

At the Stark mansion, the Jarvises were in bed and most of the lights were off. There was still a light in Howard's workshop, but Peggy coasted to a stop in a stealthy corner of the Stark carpark and circumvented any areas of the house where someone might be up. 

Jack seemed to be in a state of shock. He hadn't spoken in the car, and he followed them in an uncharacteristic silence. He hadn't even asked for his gun back.

Peggy took them into a parlor in one of the mostly-unused wings of the mansion and poured drinks for all three of them. Jack accepted his with a hand that was still shaking slightly and sank onto an expensive Queen Anne-style sofa. Peggy and Daniel sat on either side of him, flanking him.

"I was really going to do it," he said quietly after emptying the glass in a few long slugs and refilling it. "I came out there prepared to ... I have a shovel in my trunk, for God's sake."

"Were we the first?" Daniel asked bluntly. "You done this before, Jack?"

Jack flinched; the whiskey sloshed in the glass. "Not ... this," he said after a moment. "No. God, no." After a long pause he said, so softly Peggy could barely hear him, "I'd be lying if I said my hands are clean, though. I knew what was going on. There was always a reason. Always an excuse."

They were sitting very close together, so close she could feel the warmth of his body, could see the very slight tremors of his hand transmitted through the amber liquid in the glass. "You've always been a worthy adversary," she said. "And you've always seemed to me like someone who was genuinely dedicated to maintaining law and order back in New York. A good agent who made some bad choices along the way, not a bad man."

"That means a lot coming from a criminal." But his tone was more thoughtful, with less of the harsh taint of self-loathing.

"So how about we turn it around on them?" Peggy leaned even closer; her hair was nearly brushing his shoulder. "Help us, Jack. Vernon Masters and the Council trust you. You could walk in right under their noses and collect evidence of the things they've been up to, colluding to rig elections and destabilize international economies. The sort of legwork that would take us months, you could do in days."

Jack's hand tightened convulsively on the whiskey glass. He drained it and reached for the bottle, filling it up to the top. "So you can do what with it? Rip apart the fabric of society? Get a mob baying for Vernon and the rest, like you did with Hughes?"

"If we are destroying anything, it's a corrupt power structure that exists only to prop up tyrants and crush the hopes of the middle class and the poor. No one is willing to stand up for those people, and to take a stand against Vernon Masters and his ilk. If we don't do it, who will?"

Jack shook his head and took a drink. "God save me from idealists." He turned to Daniel. "What about you? You haven't said much. Are you on board with her trying to pull me into the little revolution you two are running?"

"It's not a revolution," Daniel said. "All I know is, the more I find out about everything the Council has their hand in, and everything they've done, the clearer it is to me that I can't sit by and let them get away with it. And ..." He tipped his head to the side, looking at Jack, and something came into his eyes then, a kind of warmth. "Sometimes that means taking a leap of faith. I trust Peggy's instincts; that's all I've got."

Jack swallowed and looked down into his drink, then glanced up at Peggy. "So how am I supposed to explain you two running around when I was told to lay you in a shallow grave? That's not gonna do much for my standing with Vernon."

"Here." Peggy bowed her head and took off the necklace she habitually wore. She placed the pendant and chain in Jack's palm; her hand rested atop his for a moment. "This can serve as proof of our deaths, if they want any. And Daniel and I will stay out of sight for a little while. Everything we need to do at this point is behind-the-scenes legwork anyway, at least for the time being."

Jack opened his hand and stared at the necklace in his palm. "You're talking about going rogue. Turning traitor."

"Jack," she said, drawing his eyes back to her face. "This is about stopping the bad guys. Just because they wear nice suits and do their crimes from board rooms instead of back alleys doesn't make them less wrong. It only makes them more dangerous, because people can't see them for what they really are."

"So the alternative is to suit up, go out and snipe them from the shadows?"

"I never wanted to be this," she said quietly. "I became this because the world wouldn't let me do anything else, unless I was willing to settle for being a secretary or a housewife. What about you, Jack? What did you join the SSR for?"

Well, honestly, because Vernon got him the job. But he'd really _loved_ working for the SSR, something he could only see now in retrospect, when it had become less about protecting the country, protecting the citizens he was responsible for, and more about doing Vernon's dirty work.

He'd only ever wanted to do what was right.

"What about it, Jack?" Daniel asked softly. "Are you in?"

Silence. Then he nodded, just once.

 

***

 

Peggy drove Jack back to the road where he'd left his car. Daniel came with them as far as the mansion's foyer, but no farther; Jack waited impatiently just inside the door, hidden from outside observers, while she kissed Daniel goodbye. A whole conversation happened between them without a word spoken: yes, she'd be all right; no, he didn't have to come, there was plenty to do here with the satchel of evidence from the Council to sort through.

"Think we can trust him?" Daniel murmured against her lips.

"I only wish I knew."

She left him with a final light kiss -- only willing to acknowledge to herself, as she held the door for Jack, that their lingering goodbye _had_ been something of a show for Jack's benefit. He gave her an arch glance. "Isn't Lover Boy coming?"

"I can handle the demanding job of a chauffeur, Jack."

She held the car door for him, as Jarvis had occasionally held the doors of Howard's cars for her. Jack gave her a long look and got in.

Peggy glanced back as she opened the driver's door. Daniel was watching from the doorway. When he saw her looking back, he gave her a small wave.

Daniel was her touchstone. He'd always been, ever since she'd walked into the back office of Costa & Martins Shipping and found a soft-spoken, intelligent man instead of the thuggish type she'd expected. She hadn't realized she'd been missing something, working alone, until Daniel had slipped so easily into her life and, eventually, into her bed.

These changes had come so easily with Daniel, even if it had taken her awhile to realize what, exactly, she wanted. She'd been lost in her grief for Steve, distracted by her anger at MI-6 and the SSR for throwing her away. And then Daniel had come into her life and waltzed quietly past all of her defenses.

And now ...

Now, she drove with Jack in the passenger seat, the radio turned low and playing soft jazz as they drove on the dark roads, taking a winding back way to the Arena Club. It was oddly companionable driving together in the night. Jack gazed out the window, and when she looked his way, she could only see his profile in the glow of the headlights.

"Car's up there," he said at last, rousing himself from his reverie. He glanced at her, his eyes a dark flicker.

Peggy stopped a little way up the street and pulled under the sweeping branches of a low-hanging tree. "Daniel and I will be in touch. For now, play their game and don't give them a reason to suspect you."

"I know how to do undercover work, Carter."

"I didn't mean to imply otherwise." She found herself uncharacteristically at a loss for words. What did she even say to him? She'd sent numerous agents into the field while working with the SOE, always knowing the job was terribly dangerous and they might never come back. This was not so different. But she wasn't his handler. They were allies, nothing more. She wasn't sure where to begin, what words of encouragement or advice to offer.

Jack was the one who made a move. He leaned across the space between the seats and kissed her. He tasted like whiskey, and there was a light scruff of stubble on his upper lip. The kiss was quick and soft, with a brush of his tongue at the end, dragged lightly across her lips.

"I owed you a kiss," he said with a Cheshire cat smile, "from last year, at the docks." And he got out before she could say anything.

In spite of how much he'd had to drink at Howard's mansion, his walk was perfectly straight and steady as he strolled down the street, casual and alert. He didn't look like a man walking into the lion's den.


	5. Chapter 5

It was a strange feeling, being in as deep as he was with the Council, and yet not being a part of that world anymore. It felt to Jack as if the life he'd known was only a cardboard facade and now he was glimpsing the grinding gears beneath. One false step, and the gears would grind him to hamburger.

But, for the first time in months, he wasn't drinking himself to sleep anymore.

Peggy and Sousa seemed to be sticking to their word and staying out of sight. When he'd brought Peggy's necklace to Vernon, he'd been rewarded with a smile and a hearty, "Nice _work,_ Jack. I knew you were the right man for the job."

There'd been a time when he had hungered for those compliments. Now ... it was nothing but cardboard, like all the rest of this world he'd coveted.

No one seemed to be watching him. If Vernon or any of the others had their suspicions, they were subtle enough that Jack wasn't aware of it. He was still as vigilant as possible, though, never trusting that any given location wasn't bugged, even his car or his house. This was a very dangerous game he was playing now, a tightrope walk above an ocean full of sharks.

He tried to think of it like just another case. He'd gone undercover before. He was good at it, smiling and saying all the right things, staying buddy-buddy with the other guys in the L.A. office while knowing that any of them could be reporting to Vernon.

_Do I have any actual friends here? Is there a single person in this office I can trust?_

The answer, he knew, was "no". Right now he had more faith in two criminals than he did in anyone working for the U.S. government, and how was _that_ for a sorry state of affairs?

He didn't dare go back to the Stark mansion. Instead Peggy and Daniel met him at a diner in a seedy part of town where Jack had never been. He went up to the counter and nursed a cup of coffee for a half-hour or so before they slid onto the stools beside him, one on each side, smoothly as if they'd rehearsed it. Peggy wore a blond wig with a wide-brimmed hat on top of it. There was no real way to disguise Daniel -- the war wound made him too conspicuous -- so they hadn't bothered, although he was wearing a hat to at least partly conceal his face.

"Right here in public?" Jack murmured. "Really?"

"The owners are friends," Peggy said quietly. "They won't talk." She nodded to the waitress, a middle-aged woman with arms as thick as a construction worker's and a tattoo on her forearm, and the waitress nodded back and went to wipe down some tables. At this hour, there was no one else in the diner, the breakfast crowd having trickled out and the lunch rush not yet arrived.

"I'm not going to ask," Jack decided.

Peggy slid a piece of paper across the counter to him with one bright-nailed finger. Jack scanned it. Street addresses were followed by terse descriptions: _back alley beside rubbish bins, 5th row up, hollow behind loose brick in wall_ was one; another, following the address of a library: _second floor, agriculture section, between volumes four and five of LEGUMES: A COMPLETE HISTORY_.

"Dead drops?" he guessed. He'd never worked in espionage during the war, but he had a rough grasp on spycraft as an SSR agent.

"Exactly. I suggest you memorize the locations and destroy the list. We'll pass you messages, and you can leave anything you have for us."

"Very cloak and dagger," Jack remarked, scanning it. " _Rope tied to storm drain, use to leave/retrieve items_ ... really?"

A smile touched Peggy's lips, and Jack had to drag his eyes away from the mesmerizing bright red of her lipstick, making him want to touch and taste. Even in disguise, she'd still gone for that startling crimson. "You can suggest a better idea if you have one. The important thing --"

"-- is not to come in contact with each other, yeah, I got it."

"How suspicious are they?" Daniel asked. "The Council, that is."

"What, of me? Not at all. The necklace helped a lot, but I don't think Vernon has the slightest clue that I wouldn't follow orders there."

The knowledge still galled him -- that Vernon thought of him as _that_ much of a chump. Put a gun in his hands, send him to kill two people ... and Vernon hadn't batted an eye when he came back with news of the deed having been done. 

_This isn't who I used to be._

He had no idea how much of that showed on his face, but Daniel nudged his arm. When he spoke it was quiet, serious. "This is dangerous, what we're asking you to do."

"I'm not afraid," Jack said, sharply defensive. And he wasn't. After fighting his way through a jungle of uncertainty and indecision for months, trying to choose between an endless array of wrong options with no right ones, this felt like coming out into clear air. He still wasn't completely sure if he was doing the right thing, but at least he was doing _something_.

"No one said you were," Peggy said. "Do try not to get yourself shot, however."

"Good pep talk. Aces. Glad we had this chat." He shoved the list of dead drops into his pocket to be dealt with later.

As he started to slide off his stool, Daniel said, "So I hear Peggy got a kiss last time."

Jack turned to flash him an easy grin. "You want one too?"

And Daniel blushed, a pink flush tinting his cheeks.

Holy shit, Jack thought, he really does.

For Jack, in the past, being with men had always been more like feeding an addiction than seeking affection in someone else's arms. It was blowing off steam, he told himself; it was getting those urges out when there were no women around. Sometimes it felt more like punishing himself than having fun. Alcohol and blow jobs out back of bars or barracks had been most of his experience of sex with men up until this point. 

But Daniel was ... God ... he _wanted_ to kiss those lips, wanted to see how kissing him was like and unlike kissing Peggy.

He almost did it. Almost. Here in public and everything. Instead he reached out and scruffed Daniel's hair, and Daniel's look of disbelieving irritation made him laugh, feeling lighter than he had in days.

_I almost shot him,_ he thought, and the idea of how easily he could have wiped the life out of Daniel's eyes, out of Peggy's, made the laughter die in his throat.

"Watch your backs, you two," he said as he turned away. He went out the door without looking back.

After that, they stayed out of sight, and he left packages at their drop sites -- packages which always vanished so promptly that it made him wonder if they were watching him. What came back to him were brief notes, warnings, small crumbs from the parallel investigation Peggy and Daniel were conducting on their own.

And it really did feel like an investigation, like working jointly with a different agency. Except this agency consisted of a couple of rogues with mob ties.

_Probably how most intelligence agencies got their start, though, before there was an official intelligence network._ There had even been people like that during the war, as he'd only learned later through classified SSR files: volunteer agents, unable to get official recognition or backing, risking their lives out of pure patriotic duty.

_And where do I fit into all of this?_

Caught between two worlds, that was how he felt. He went through the motions of his job at the SSR while working to undermine them (no, not the SSR, he told himself; it was the Council he was working against, because the SSR was a good agency once, and it could be again if the rotten elements were rooted out). And he prepared his evidence drops for Peggy and Daniel, wishing with a small lonely corner of his soul that he was out there with them instead of making nice with Vernon and the boys at the office while double-dealing behind their back.

It was a tightrope walk that couldn't last. What Jack expected to bring it crashing down was getting another assignment from Vernon that he wouldn't be able to carry out. He had already decided that he wasn't going to kill anyone, not even to keep his cover. So far, though, Vernon had backed off, as if realizing that Jack could only be pushed so far and no farther until the "murder" had had time to soak in. Of course Vernon had a good knack for knowing when to push and when to use a lighter touch. It was what made him so good at what he did.

_He sure played you like a fine-tuned instrument all these months, didn't he, Jack?_

If things hadn't come to a head with Vernon yet, it was only a matter of time -- and it was also just a matter of time before one of the agents working under him at the SSR smelled a rat.

Or at least it should have been. Now that he was looking at the agency with an outsider's eyes, however, Jack began to realize that the SSR was well and truly turning into the Council's catspaw. The New York office hadn't been so bad. Dooley had kept a tight fist on the reins while he was still alive, and a lot of the guys working there had been his hand-picked men. Here, though ... most of the men at the West Coast office were new, and most of them had been hired for their willingness to follow orders without asking questions. They might not all be corrupt -- in fact, Jack was pretty sure the majority of them weren't -- but they weren't the kind of guys who were going to look at what was happening around them and start noticing funny business. Which worked out well for his purposes ... but _damn,_ he thought, this bunch couldn't find their ass with both hands and a map. If he were really running this agency, instead of going through the motions of running it while Vernon ran _him_ ...

The wild idea occurred to him, from time to time, of breaking ties with Peggy and Daniel and their anti-Council agenda, and trying to fix the SSR instead. He could fire half these people, hire new guys ... he didn't think Vernon would act directly against him, as long as he made a good case for the SSR's usefulness and stood his ground. Vernon didn't really care about the SSR at all, Jack was fairly sure, as long as it wasn't acting directly against him or the Council. And Jack could make sure that it wouldn't be.

He could turn the SSR back into what it used to be under Dooley, what it was supposed to be. As long as they stayed out of the Council's way, they could do a lot of good in the world. But he couldn't do that and take on the Council too, because right now what he needed to be was Vernon's obedient yes-man, following orders and not making waves.

And, damn it, those two maverick idiots were right about the Council. Could he really go back to arresting minor criminals, while knowing that vastly greater crimes were taking place on his watch and he was letting it happen? Tacitly abetting them, even, by allowing them to operate unchecked?

Damn it.

He was already known around the office as a hard worker, so it wasn't hard to find excuses to stay at the SSR late, or drop by the Arena Club -- where he was now welcome, thanks to Vernon -- at odd hours to socialize a bit (and crawl around the back offices when he had the chance). As he got to know more of the members of the Council, it gave him more opportunities to stop by their places of business and do a bit of judicious snooping. If it gave him a bit of notoriety as a brown-noser, what of it, he told himself. That was all to the good, for his purposes; if they thought he was more interested in advancing his career than doing his actual job, that was the reputation he _wanted_ to cultivate.

And maybe, just maybe, he got cocky.

He was at one of Mortimer Hayes' newspaper offices after hours, digging through financial records in the business office. The newspaper had been put to bed, everyone had gone home, and Jack had slipped in quietly using a key he'd borrowed from Hayes a few days earlier while having drinks at the Arena Club ("Here, I'll drop that file by the office for you, sir; no need for you to go in") and then "forgotten" to return. Hayes' media empire was one of the Council's prime tools in their propaganda arsenal, and Jack had suspected there would be evidence of bribes, payoffs, and stories being killed or rewritten for propaganda purposes if he could find the right files. He was snapping photos of paperwork under a desk lamp, to be placed in one of Peggy's dead drops later, when there was a soft throat-clearing noise from the doorway.

Jack tensed, looking up as a blizzard of possible excuses and cover stories swirled through his brain. He'd come near getting caught a few times, but claiming he was on official SSR business, or running an errand for Vernon or one of Vernon's cronies, had covered his ass every time so far.

This time, though, he was looking at Agent Vega standing in the doorway with a gun pointed at him.

"What the hell, Vega," Jack said when he'd recovered from the shock. "Stand down."

"I don't think so." Vega glanced down at the papers spread out on the desk. "You know, I hoped it wouldn't be true."

"Hoped what wouldn't be true, Vega?" Jack asked, standing up slowly.

"Ah, ah. Don't even think about it."

Jack made sure Vega could see his hands, and clamped a cool mask over the panic trying to claw its way out. "You're messing with matters way above your league, Agent. You're going to have some powerful people to explain yourself to."

"Powerful people like Vernon Masters?" Vega inquired. "Who do you think wanted me to follow you in the first place?"

Jack hoped for one optimistic instant that Vega was lying. But, no. That was the sincerity of the well-paid henchman in Vega's face.

_Shit, shit, shit._ Jack wondered what he'd done that had tipped Vernon off. Maybe it was nothing more than generalized paranoia. Maybe all of Vernon's "trusted associates" had someone keeping an eye on them. Or maybe he'd gotten overconfident, made mistakes ...

All he could do now was keep going and hope that the mistakes he'd made didn't turn out to be his last.

"Is Vernon here too?" Jack asked, stepping slowly around the end of the desk. _God, I hope not._ "Maybe we can make a deal --"

"Hold it!" Vega snapped, pointing the gun at his chest. Jack froze. "Don't even think about trying anything. Blackwell's covering the exit downstairs. You're not going anywhere."

"Just the two of you, huh?" Jack said, and saw an instant's nervousness flicker across Vega's face.

They must be trying to score points by bringing in the rogue agent themselves. Jack felt a glimmer of hope. Vega and Blackwell must have trailed him to the newspaper office, but it looked like they hadn't called in for backup. All he had to do was get past Vega up here, and Blackwell downstairs, and then ...

\-- then he'd be a fugitive, but he'd have to cross that bridge when he got there.

"Let's have the gun," Vega said. "Take it out slowly, put in on the floor and kick it over here."

Jack carefully extricated his weapon from its holster. Could he get off a shot before Vega could? But Vega already had his gun cocked and aimed at Jack's chest. He could squeeze the trigger in less time than it would take Jack to get his hand on the trigger and snap off a shot that might not even connect.

Jack dropped the gun and gave it a gentle kick.

Vega crouched to retrieve it.

And Jack made his move. He feinted to the side and lashed out at Vega's gun hand. The gun went off, missing him totally, and then he kicked it out of Vega's grasp. 

They both went for Jack's gun on the floor.

"You couldn't have come in quietly," Vega grunted, as they struggled for control of the gun, thrashing around on the floor.

"I knew ... what I was heading into ..." The gun was trapped between them; Jack could feel its hard edges pressing into his hip. "You think Vernon's gonna let me walk away now? I'm a desperate man, Vega."

The gun discharged, and Vega fell back with a cry. Jack scrambled away from him. Vega was doubled over, clutching his thigh; blood splattered the linoleum, the wall, and Jack's hand and shirtfront.

The second gunshot came as a total shock. Jack looked down at the gun in his hand, thinking for an instant he'd pulled the trigger without meaning to -- before his brain caught up with the cold spike of pain between his shoulder blades, before he started to slump sideways against the wall, and he realized he'd been shot in the back.

Jack turned, firing blindly. It was Blackwell behind him, in the newspaper's outer office, shooting across the room. Blackwell had always been a lousy shot and that was probably the only thing that had saved him from dying before he even knew what hit him.

"Kill him!" Vega snarled.

Instead, Blackwell hit the floor as Jack kept shooting at him, emptying the gun's magazine. Whether Blackwell was surprised, wounded, or dead, Jack wasn't sure, and he didn't really care. He stumbled past Blackwell and down the stairs to the building's door, taking the stairs three at a time. Pure terror kept him moving. If he stopped he was going to die. 

He staggered out onto the street. His car, at least, was parked where he'd left it. Jack fumbled with the door handle. He was lightheaded and dazed, panting in shallow gasps; he couldn't get a deep breath. Blood soaked the back of his shirt and trickled into the waistband of his pants. He half-fell into the driver's seat. The key slipped out of his shaking hand and he nearly passed out when he reached down to retrieve it. He had to rest his forehead for a moment on the steering wheel.

He wasn't going to make it far like this. And where the hell could he go?

Hospital -- no, he thought muzzily. Not if Vernon knew Jack had betrayed him. Any hospital in the city would be a death trap. They could take care of him at their leisure as soon as they found him.

Where, then? Sick with pain, weak and dazed, he struggled to think.

He could only come up with one place.

 

***

 

The table in Howard Stark's second-best drawing room was covered with papers, notes, and a few rolls of magnetic recording tape. Peggy scribbled industriously as she sorted through the most recent package of Council-related financial records from Jack.

"This is great," Daniel said, working on his own half of the package. "We should have suborned an SSR agent months ago."

Peggy winked at him. "We had to wait for the right one to come along."

Daniel blushed faintly, a pink sunrise coloring his cheekbones. "You know he's a little sweet on you, right Peg?" he asked, with his gaze on the papers he was sorting instead of on her.

"What, _just_ me?"

The blush intensified. "You know, I've still got his damn coat. It's too big to fit in one of your dead drops."

"Next time we meet him, you should show up wearing it."

"Peggy!"

"I will pay you to do that for me, Daniel. I need to see his expression."

"God." He covered his face briefly with his hands.

She touched his shoulder, and let her hand rest against the side of his neck, the fingers stroking lightly across the soft skin above the open collar of his loose shirt. "There were times when I wondered if I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. With Jack, the way he looks at you -- I was fairly sure. With you ... not so much. I know some men and women don't hew strictly to their own sex. That wasn't something I knew about you."

He laid his hand over hers, pressing her fingers against his skin. "Well, a guy doesn't exactly go around taking out full-page advertisements in the _Times."_

Peggy had to laugh. "True."

"Besides, it's even more complicated for me. I wasn't sure ..." He hesitated, and she worked her fingers through his, weaving them together. "The way I felt when I saw you ... it was a surprise for me. You're the first woman I've ... been with, that way."

"Daniel! You should have told me, I had no idea I was your ..." She trailed off then, and looked at him more closely. "Oh," she said. "You don't mean -- oh, the first _woman._ I see."

His gaze dropped away, avoiding hers. "I know I didn't say anything before. I'm sorry about that."

"Why should you be? It's your life."

"Most women wouldn't be okay with it."

"Then those women are fools," Peggy said. She grasped his hand and brought it to her lips.

Daniel looked up and met her eyes at last, a little shyly. "So now what?"

"Now," she said firmly, returning her attention to the papers on the table, "now we make some decisions about how to proceed."

"With the Council."

"Yes, with the Council, of course."

"Uh-huh." Smiling slightly, he gently extricated his hand from hers and began clipping together the neat piles of papers in front of him. "It's gonna be delicate. The problem with having a guy on the inside is that we can't make a move without blowing his cover. The Council's gonna know they've got a mole."

"Yes, but they don't know --"

A loud clatter, coming from outside, made both of them jump. Their eyes met in shared alarm.

"Howard's at the movie studio," Peggy said. "And the Jarvises are in bed."

"Could be the animals."

"Could be."

But Daniel was already reaching for a drawer in the end table, and Peggy bent over and put a hand under the couch cushion she was sitting on. She'd taken the liberty of stashing guns all over the house, so there would always be one within reach.

"Split up?"

She shook her head. "Let's take a look first and see what we're dealing with."

They went together to the front door, Daniel a step behind her with his gun resting by his leg. Peggy cracked the door open and peeked out. Although the night was dark, the Stark grounds were well lit, and the source of the noise was instantly obvious. A car had veered onto the front lawn, knocking over several pieces of ornamental statuary and a birdbath, and was now half buried in a hedge. 

"Trap?" Daniel asked, looking past her. "Distraction?"

"I don't know. Nothing seems to have triggered the alarm system." Having a pair of fugitives staying with him, Howard had been devising ever more complicated and increasingly dangerous perimeter defenses. There was nothing to stop someone from coming up the front drive, however. Peggy had convinced Howard that the odds of an assassin coming in the front were considerably less than the inconvenience of having to deactivate the alarm system twenty times a day or risk electrocuting the mailman.

Now, she and Daniel approached the car cautiously. The engine was still running and the headlights were on, but the front end was smashed and it didn't look like it was going anywhere. She could see someone stirring in the driver's seat. The driver's side door opened, and Peggy leveled her gun as a figure spilled out of the door and tumbled onto the lawn.

"That's Jack," Daniel said in a startled tone.

Peggy tucked her gun away and crouched on the grass beside him. "Jack?" He seemed barely conscious, and his skin was shockingly cold to the touch. Then she realized what she'd taken for a dark shirt was actually a white shirt soaked with blood.

"Bloody hell, Daniel, I think he's been shot or stabbed."

"Vernon," Jack whispered. His teeth were chattering. "Vernon knows. One of his men clipped me -- got the bastard, though --"

"If you call this being 'clipped,' I'd hate to find out what you consider a serious injury," Peggy muttered, struggling to get him on his feet. He probably shouldn't be moved, but then, he should probably have a doctor, and she didn't dare take him to a hospital if Vernon was onto him. They had to get him out of sight.

"Were you followed?" Daniel asked. He wrapped an arm around Jack from the other side, taking some of his weight until Peggy got his arm over her shoulders. "Jack, I need an answer here."

"Don't think so. Not sure ..."

Daniel looked at Peggy over the top of Jack's head. "I'll hide the car in Stark's garage." 

She nodded. "I'll get him inside."

As Daniel shifted Jack's weight to rest on Peggy's shoulders, she couldn't help noticing that Jack's blood was all over him, as it was all over her now. The driver's seat of the car was soaked, and Jack's clothes were sodden in it. How could someone lose that much blood and live?

"No hospitals," he whispered, clutching at her arm and leaning heavily on her as she helped him into the house. "Vernon ..."

"Don't worry, I've come to the same conclusion. We have a friend who sometimes helps us with this kind of thing. We'll call her."

She took him into her and Daniel's bedroom without thinking about it; it was the route through the house she knew best. Oh well, if she was going to get blood all over the furniture, it may as well be their bed. She helped Jack lie down. "Where are you hurt?" she asked him. "Shot, stabbed, impaled?"

"Shot," he murmured. "Back."

Peggy turned him onto his stomach just as Daniel arrived in the doorway. "The car's hidden, and I called Violet. She's on her way over." 

"Do you have a knife on you?"

Daniel passed her a penknife and Peggy began cutting the sodden shirt away from Jack's back. Her hands were already crimson, her blouse ruined. With one hand pressed against Jack's rib cage, stabilizing him as she peeled away the shirt, she could feel his shallow, labored breathing.

"What is happening?" a startled voice asked from the doorway.

The commotion had awakened the Jarvises. Ana was in the doorway, wrapped in a robe with her hair pinned up and eyes wide.

"Ana, could you bring us a basin of warm water, please?" Peggy asked. "And some towels."

Ana didn't ask questions; she'd been dealing with them too long to be surprised. She ducked out and was gone.

Daniel had a hand resting on Jack's shoulder, but Peggy wasn't sure if Jack knew either of them were there. He seemed to have passed out. His bare back was sticky with blood, and it looked to her as if he'd been shot twice, just beside his right shoulder blade and lower, on the ribs of the same side.

"Peggy," Daniel said quietly. "I don't know if we can handle this ourselves, even with Violet's help. He needs a doctor."

"We can't take him to a hospital. Not if Vernon's after him."

"He'll be a sitting duck, I agree, but the alternative is watching him bleed out here."

Ana came back with a steaming basin and an armload of towels. "Edwin is seeing to the mess on the lawn. Is this your SSR friend?"

"I'm afraid so," Peggy sighed. "Thank you, Ana. I'm so sorry to involve you both." She took one of the towels, folded it up, and pressed against Jack's gory back, trying to ignore Jack's soft groan as she bore down. Right now, stopping the bleeding was the biggest priority.

"We were already involved," Ana told her. "We believe in what you're doing, Edwin and I. Besides, after the things we've done, the things we've lived through ..." She smiled slightly. "The Council is not so frightening."

"Be that as it may, I'd be more comfortable if you and Mr. Jarvis were out of harm's way for a few days. Is there anywhere you can go? A friend, perhaps, or one of Howard's other properties?"

"We will not abandon you," Ana said firmly.

"Although ..." Jarvis's voice said from the doorway. He winced when he saw the bloody mess that the bed was turning into, and averted his eyes. "A change of scene for all of us might not be a bad idea. We could relocate to the Malibu property, or to Mr. Stark's ranch."

"Howard owns a ranch?" Daniel said. His hand was still on Jack's shoulder, rubbing gently in, Peggy thought, a largely unconscious attempt at comfort or distraction.

"As regrettably vulgar an establishment as one might expect," Jarvis said in tones of weary resignation. "It is, however, quite isolated, with no close neighbors, and it is a recent acquisition. Mr. Stark intended it for, er, private getaways, but it's seen little use so far."

"It sounds perfect," Peggy said. "It may be a day or two before we can move Jack, but I think we should do it. At the very least it will delay the Council in realizing that we may not be as dead as we are supposed to be."

"We could fake Jack's death too," Daniel mused. "Just thinkin' out loud here, but we've got a blood-stained car in the garage ... gotta be some way to use that to slow them down, at least."

The sound of the doorbell made them all flinch. "That's probably Violet," Daniel said. "At least I hope it's Violet. No, don't!" Jarvis had turned instinctively to head for the door. "I'll get it. Just in case it's not."

He gave Jack's shoulder a parting squeeze and got up, reaching for the gun tucked into the waistband of his trousers as he did so. Ana stepped aside as he went past her, her eyes tracking the gun.

"I suggest both of you begin preparations to relocate," Peggy said. "At least Howard is on location with his film crew for the next few days; that's one less thing to worry about. But I wouldn't mind having the two of you at the ranch, with the rest of us to follow as soon as possible. I'll feel more comfortable with you two out of town."

Daniel came back in with Violet, who was clutching her medical bag. "It never ends with you two, does it?" she said, taking in the sight of Jack facedown on the bed and Peggy pressing the bloodstained towel against his back. "You understand I'm not a miracle worker, correct? This man should be in the hospital."

"I agree," Peggy said, moving away to let Violet move in to work. "But we haven't a choice."

Violet sat on the edge of the bed and carefully pulled back the towel. "I'll need more hot water, and someone with steady hands to assist me."

"Right, packing," Jarvis said briskly, turned on his heel, and left.

Ana lingered, her hands clasped together. "I'd like to help, if there's anything I can do."

"Bring us more water?" Peggy suggested. 

She and Daniel took turns handing Violet the things she asked for, unwinding bandages, and dipping cloths in hot water, which Ana quietly brought in fresh basins as needed. Violet gave Jack a morphine shot at the start of the process, and this seemed to relax him somewhat, although what she was doing couldn't have felt pleasant. He seemed to pass out about halfway through.

"He's lucky," Violet said at last, as she worked at bandaging the disinfected, still sluggishly bleeding wounds. "I think his ribs deflected the bullets; otherwise he'd have a collapsed lung. He should be watched closely for the first day or so, however. If he starts to have trouble breathing, his chest cavity may be compromised after all, and you need to get him to someone with more qualifications than a nursing degree."

"Don't sell yourself short, Violet; you're great," Daniel told her.

"Flirt," she scoffed. "The other thing he needs, that I can't give him with what I have here, is a replacement for the blood he lost. Give him liquids if he can tolerate them, and understand that he'll be very weak for a while. And watch for fever. That's all you can do."

She gave him a sulfa injection and, with help from Peggy and Daniel, propped him with pillows so he was turned halfway on his side rather than flat on his stomach -- "He'll breathe easier this way."

"We can't thank you enough, Violet," Peggy said.

"Just _try_ not to get yourselves killed," Violet sighed, packing up her things.

Peggy pulled the coverlet over Jack and walked out with them to the foyer. Jarvis had done an impressive job of covering up the car's traces on the lawn, she thought, looking out the window. Knowing where it had happened, she could see a few disturbances in the turf and some broken branches in the hedge, but it was plain from his swift efficiency that he'd had some experience. Working for Howard probably included a lot of practice at cleaning up messes of all varieties.

After bidding farewell to Violet, she scrubbed her hands thoroughly to rid them of Jack's blood, which had sunk into the creases in her palms and around her nails. Her blouse was a lost cause. She gazed at herself in the mirror for a moment before pulling herself together and returning to the bedroom. Here, she found Ana cleaning up the bloodstained towels and bowls of water, while Jarvis hovered as if he didn't quite trust in his wife's safety with even an incapacitated federal agent.

Jack stirred when Peggy sat down beside him on the edge of the bed, blinking his eyes slowly open. He was very pale, his lips bloodless and faintly blue. "Who are these people," he mumbled, "and why are they in my bedroom?"

"They are Ana and Edwin Jarvis, and you are in _our_ bedroom."

"Oh," he murmured, and closed his eyes as if trying to understand was more effort than he could manage at the moment.

"I think we are going to get some sleep," Ana said, turning back in the doorway with her arms full of soiled towels. "If we are moving in the morning, we should be rested for it."

Peggy smiled. "That's a plan we should all emulate. And, Ana ... thank you."

After both Jarvises were gone, she gave in to temptation and held Jack's hand for a little while, rubbing her thumb lightly across the back of it. Daniel hadn't come back, she noticed. Laying Jack's hand gently back on the bed, she rose and went to find out where Daniel had got himself off to.

She found him in the garage with Jack's car. The driver's door stood open, and Peggy glanced at the stains in the seat, drying now to dark rust. Her hands were still rough and red from the scrubbing she'd given them, and she curled them into loose fists, trying not to think about the heat and stickiness of Jack's blood on her skin.

"How is he?" Daniel asked, straightening up from examining the car's damaged front end.

"Sleeping. What are you up to?"

"Just figuring out how to fake a murder without having a body to leave at the crime scene. Another thing I never had to do when I worked for the mob, by the way. Thanks for that."

Peggy smiled and leaned on his shoulder, brushing his neck with her lips, while he put an arm around her. "Fake Jack's death and hide out at the Stark ranch while he recovers some of his strength, and then drop a bomb on the Council, do you think?"

"We'll definitely need a good escape plan for it. These guys play for keeps." 

She rested her head on his shoulder. "We could go to England for a while. I'll show you some of my old haunts."

"Yeah, I'm sure we'd be there all of two days before you'd find some vitally important wrong that MI-6 wasn't righting to your satisfaction, and off we'd go."

Peggy laughed softly against his neck. "I believe Howard owns at least one tropical resort. We could go there and lie on a beach for a while, but you'd be bored, admit it."

"Besides," he said, tilting his head to rest against hers, "I'd end up red as a lobster."

"I don't know, you're tanning quite handsomely."

They leaned into each other for a little while, before Daniel said quietly, "It's been a long night, and there's still a few hours 'til dawn." He gave a little tug with the arm still draped loosely around her waist. "Let's go to bed."

"Is this the point where I need to remind you that there's someone _in_ our bed?"

Daniel smiled. "It's a big bed, isn't it?"

In the bedroom, Jack didn't appear to have moved since she'd last seen him. Peggy leaned over and very lightly touched his throat, feeling for the faint flutter of his pulse. She brushed the back of her hand across his forehead -- still terribly cold, but he was sleeping, not dead.

She disrobed with less self-consciousness than she'd expected, changing into a pair of silk pajamas. In the attached bathroom, Daniel had stripped out of his trousers and was taking off his leg, going through the nightly self-care ritual that had become as familiar to her as her own routines. 

It was all very casual, matter-of-fact, as if they always went through their nighttime routine with an injured SSR agent in their bed.

Stranger things had happened, she supposed.

She slipped into the bed, at first trying to leave Jack some space -- but he was cold, so cold that his body heat barely warmed the sheets. 

He'd come very close to death. _We almost lost him tonight._ She rolled over and curled herself against him, trying to warm him a little without hurting him.

Daniel limped over in a T-shirt and boxers, using the crutch with his leg off. He looked down at the two of them with a soft heat in his eyes, before leaning the crutch in its usual place beside the bed and getting in on the other side. Jack was nested gently between them.

"So much to do in the morning," Peggy murmured sleepily.

"It'll keep," Daniel said softly.

It seemed to her that Jack had warmed ever so slightly against her. She closed her eyes.


	6. Chapter 6

Jack woke in pain and, as consciousness trickled back, increasing levels of confusion.

That tangle of dark curls in front of his face ...

This wasn't his bed.

He started to move and remembered why that was a bad idea when sharp pain tore through his back and spiked a blinding headache. He felt terrible: weak and shaky and horribly thirsty.

"You're awake," a voice said quietly from behind him. A male voice. Jack flinched, and very carefully turned his head to see ...

... Daniel Sousa, sleep-tousled, with his chin propped in his hand, looking at him in amusement tinged with fondness.

"What," Jack said faintly.

"How much of last night do you remember?"

"I remember getting shot. I don't remember anything that would explain why I'm apparently ..." He looked at the dark mound of curls spilling across the pillow again. That was Peggy's hair. That was Peggy, curled up with her back to him, so close he could feel the heat of her body, wearing nothing but a pair of silky pajamas.

"Don't worry," Daniel said, stifled amusement in his voice. "We didn't have our way with you while you were out."

The idea was oddly appealing, but trying to answer made him cough, and that hurt so much he nearly passed out again. Dimly, while the world tilted around him and a rushing filled his ears, he was aware of Daniel's hand settling on his shoulder, warm and strong, steadying him as the world came apart around him.

As his vision cleared, he discovered Peggy was now sitting up, her hair spilling in her face, and she really was -- oh God -- wearing nothing but silky sleepwear. "Jack, how do you feel?"

"Like I got shot," he croaked.

She made a "hmmm" sound and slipped out of bed. Jack closed his eyes; even keeping them open to watch her walk across the room, hips sliding under the silk pajamas, was too much effort. He drifted for a time, with Daniel's hand on his shoulder keeping him tenuously anchored to consciousness, and woke up again when the bed dipped under Peggy. Her hand slid under his neck, and the rim of a cup was pressed to his lips.

"Here, drink."

He was too weak to do anything but obey. After the first couple of sips, he tried feebly to pry the cup out of her hand. Peggy relinquished it, and he managed to sit up a little more and drink on his own. (Okay, so his hand shook a little and he spilled some of it down his neck. It was still worth the effort of doing it himself.)

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Peggy opened a first-aid kit. "Are you in pain, Jack?"

"Morphine's probably worn off by now," Daniel said quietly, and it sounded like the voice of experience. "He'll be in pain."

Jack recognized what she took out of the case from his war days, a morphine syrette such as field medics used. When she injected him, the relief was almost instantaneous, and he could feel his muscles unknotting, his breathing coming easier.

"We need to check your dressings," Peggy said, taking items from the kit and arranging them neatly on the bed. "Daniel, can you help him roll onto his stomach?"

Jack put up with being manhandled, still too out of it to muster much resistance. The entire thing was completely surreal. Stripped to the waist, he was lying on Peggy and Daniel's bed, with the two of them on either side of him, both of _them_ half naked as well, while they redressed his injured back. Maybe it was the morphine making it all seem perfectly normal. Or maybe this was all a dream, a last hallucination as he bled out on the floor of the newspaper office.

If it was a dream, he didn't want it ever to end. He closed his eyes and leaned his face into Peggy's silk-clad thigh.

The tugging, prodding, and the cold swipes of iodine swabs on his back finally stopped. Peggy's hand settled on his head, her fingers brushing through his hair. "Are you asleep, Jack?"

"Ngghh."

"I'm going to bring you some more water and a bowl of soup, all right? Violet said you need liquids to replace the blood you lost."

He roused himself enough to ask, "Who's Violet?"

"A friend of ours who's a nurse," Daniel said, making him flinch painfully. He'd forgotten Daniel was there, a warm solid presence beside him.

Even as he registered Daniel's presence, the warm solidity slid away. Jack turned his head and watched Daniel sitting up on the edge of the bed, passing items over Jack's body to Peggy for repacking in the first-aid kit. Daniel was wearing boxers and ... oh. Huh. He'd never seen Daniel with his pants off before, hadn't actually realized that Daniel was missing a leg instead of just having had it mangled on the battlefield. His right leg stopped halfway down the thigh. It wasn't ugly, just a little startling. A pale lattice of scars laced his leg higher up, but the skin was pink and healthy over the stump.

He became aware that Daniel had stopped what he was doing and was looking at him -- looking at Jack looking at his leg. "Something I can do for you, Jack?" Daniel wanted to know, with a brittle note in his voice.

Maybe it was the morphine making him reckless, lowering his inhibitions. But when he put out a hand, Daniel didn't move away. Jack touched his thigh lightly above the scarring, and then settled his hand there.

Daniel twitched a little, and that made Jack realize how high up his hand was -- in evading the scarred area, his hand had ended up just below the hem of Daniel's boxers. He was lying here with his hand halfway up another man's groin ... no, not just any man, _Peggy's boyfriend._ He started to jerk his hand back, but Daniel caught it, and settled back where it had been, with his own on top of it.

Jack let his hand go lower, caressing the scars. He wasn't sure how Daniel would react -- wasn't sure, honestly, how _he_ would react, but there was no revulsion. Daniel's skin was warm, the scars standing out as ridges of harder tissue.

Peggy's hand came to rest on his other arm. He could feel each of her fingers like a bar of heat, their gentle swipes as they stroked across his skin.

He curled his fingertips lightly over the stump of Daniel's missing leg. It was lumpy and warm to the touch. Daniel's hand had followed his down the stump of the leg, and Daniel's strong fingers wrapped around his.

As their fingers laced together, Daniel leaned down and kissed him.

He'd thought about this. Thought about it a lot, actually ... this and a good deal more. It was a fantasy for long quiet nights in his empty townhouse and the equally empty California house: sometimes Peggy, sometimes Daniel, sometimes both of them together. 

And now he was in their bed, and Daniel was kissing him.

He'd always hated this part of himself, that drew him to men as strongly as to women -- had always fought against the urge to want the brush of stubble on his lips as intensely as he craved the taste of a woman's lipstick. He'd tried to explain it away: it was only when there were no women around, it wasn't _real_ , it didn't mean anything ...

But Daniel's lips were warm and soft and inviting. One of his hands still trapped Jack's against his leg; his other hand cupped Jack's cheek, lifting his head a little for a better angle. It was tender and intimate and slow, and when Daniel pulled away, all Jack could do was stare at him -- hopelessly, completely, helplessly in love.

Peggy said quietly, "I believe I owe _you_ a kiss this time, don't I?"

She helped him turn onto his side and sit up a little, bending from the hip, propped with pillows. Her eyes were warm and bright, her lips parted in a smile -- and no lipstick this time, he thought dazedly. He'd never seen her with it off. But when she leaned down and sampled his mouth with hers, she still tasted like it to him, a faint sweet essence.

He wondered if he tasted like Daniel to her.

She kissed him and kissed him, and when she finally let him go, he was lost, he was gone. For this, in this instant, even being shot and the recovery ahead was worth it; losing his entire life at the SSR was worth it. In that instant he'd have done anything, given anything for either one of them.

All his life he'd been the seducer, the tempter, the one to draw others in. He was charming and handsome and he knew it; he knew how to engage someone's interest, how to make them want him.

And yet, somehow these two had turned the tables on him. They'd seduced him and caught him while he thought he was trying to catch them, and only now, looking back on it, he could see how he'd been falling, all these months.

"Peggy, I think we broke him," Daniel said in a voice bubbling with laughter, and he stroked Jack's hair lightly -- still sitting on the bed behind Jack, where he couldn't quite be seen.

Peggy kissed Jack's forehead and the corner of his eye. "I'm going to bring something for you to eat now."

"All right," he murmured.

He watched her walk out, the sway of her hips in silk, the swish of her hair over her shoulders. It was too much; it was like living on bread crusts and then suddenly having a feast presented to him. All his starving stomach could handle were the crumbs, and even those were almost too much.

Daniel started to pull away, and Jack caught at him, groping blindly without looking back. "Stay?" he managed to say. It was all he could get out; he just knew he didn't want to be alone right now.

"Okay," Daniel said after a moment. He sounded uncertain, but he lay back down, spooning against Jack who was still half-turned and propped on pillows. There was some slight rustling and the pillows were shifted around as Daniel got settled, and then his warm breath ghosted across the back of Jack's neck. He was scrupulously not touching the bandaged areas, careful not to hurt him.

No one had ever been _careful_ with him before. Not like that.

Daniel's hand touched his arm, his hip, looking for a place to settle, and finally came to rest over his shoulders, holding him close.

He was almost asleep when Peggy came back with a tray. Daniel peeled away, while Peggy propped Jack up with more pillows and plied him with soup, weak tea, and orange juice.

By the time Daniel came back, fully dressed, Jack was feeling a little more energetic and the discussion had turned to making plans for the uncertain future.

"Last night we considered faking your death," Peggy told him. "It still makes a good deal of sense to do it. We have your car in Howard's garage. If we can convince Vernon Masters and the Council that you never made it to a hospital or to help, but instead drove your car off the road and bled to death, they won't look for you."

"Yeah, and how are you going to do that?" Jack wanted to know. "If they find a blood-splattered car with nobody in it, I don't think they're going to conclude 'oh, he must've wandered away and died'."

"Actually, I had an idea about that," Daniel said, dragging up a chair beside the bed. "We burn the car. Find some lonely stretch of road, make it look like you ran off the road and hit a tree ..."

"We'll still need a body in the car, or something body-like, at any rate," Peggy mused. "I don't think we could make it look like a hot enough fire to destroy it completely, so they'll need _something_ to find."

"Manfredi might be able to help us with that."

"Joseph Manfredi, the mobster?" Jack said in disbelief. "Okay, I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear any of this. La la la, not listening."

"He's actually a rather nice man," Peggy said.

"No he's not," Daniel retorted. "He's a trigger-happy homicidal maniac."

"Well ... yes ... but he's been quite helpful. And I think he'll help us with this, though we may owe him a favor."

"Owing favors to mobsters now," Jack muttered. "Better and better."

"I'll call him," Peggy decided. "And then we'll get out of sight for awhile, and marshal our case -- I think we have enough evidence, thanks to you, Jack. Out of the public eye, and dead as far as the Council knows, we can torpedo their careers from hiding. They won't know what hit them."

"They'll sure as hell figure it out, though," Jack said.

"And we'll take it as it comes." She smiled at him, dazzling. "Are you in?"

"I'm in." What else was he going to say? He felt like he'd been caught up in a whirlwind. _I'm faking my own death and running off with two vigilantes, apparently._

And he felt ...

Hope. That was it. He felt hope.

 

***

 

Ideally for Peggy's purposes, the Stark ranch was at the end of a long, winding dirt road through desolate desert country. She could guess why Howard hadn't gotten much use out of the place; it must have looked good on paper, but it was too inaccessible to make either a convenient love nest or a good weekend getaway for his business contacts.

Since moving out West, Peggy had heard about dude ranches -- tourist businesses that offered horseback riding and other "Western" pursuits, sanitized for the masses -- and she guessed that was what this place had been before Howard bought it. It didn't look like it had ever been a working ranch, but there were miles and miles of brand-new wooden fencing and log outbuildings that still smelled of fresh wood. Peggy thought it likely that some Hollywood investor had built the place to attract tourists and then realized it would never prosper in its remote location, and unloaded it cheaply on Howard.

But a group of presumed-dead fugitives couldn't have asked for a better hideout. By the time the three of them arrived, Jarvis and Ana had been in residence for a day or so, and the larder was stocked, the rooms aired out. 

Traveling for most of the day in baking desert heat, across washboard roads, had left Jack white and limp, barely able to make it to bed with Peggy and Daniel's assistance. Before letting him sleep, Peggy made him drink several glasses of water and eat half a bowl of soup. "You're a tyrant," Jack muttered, glowering weakly at her. 

"A tyrant I may be, but at least I can make sure you don't die of dehydration. We can't bring Violet all the way out here, you know."

"Sousa, help," Jack complained as Daniel came in carrying the last of their suitcases. They hadn't packed a lot of clothes; it was mostly the bits and pieces of their Council investigation. "She won't leave me alone."

"I'm not taking sides here, especially against Peggy; are you nuts?"

"You're no help."

"And you're a terrible patient," Peggy informed him, but she sat on the bed with him and carded her fingers through his hair until he fell asleep.

She wandered out into the living room of the main ranch house. It was furnished in a rich person's idea of rustic style, with rag rugs on the floor (purchased ready-made from some textile mill, probably) and low, chunky wooden furniture. Daniel was carefully collating papers and stuffing fat manilla envelopes. "Press packets," he explained, with a quick smile. "For going public, when we're ready. The newspapers will love this -- any of them that aren't owned by Hayes, that is, but when we're through with him, he'll be out on his ear anyway. Hopefully."

Peggy's eyes were drawn to a newspaper spread out beside the paperwork. _SSR CHIEF FOUND DEAD AFTER CRASH_ , read the bold headline. Daniel looked up at her silence, and followed her gaze. "Yeah," he said. "Ana was in town a little earlier and picked it up, hot off the afternoon press."

"I suppose they took the bait." Although -- she hadn't really thought about it -- Jack was going to have quite the mess to straighten out before he could step back into his old life. Assuming he wanted to. "It does make you wonder, though ... Let's say we win. Ruin the Council. We'll be leaving a large power vacuum, and I can't help wondering what might come along to take its place."

"That doesn't sound like the unreasonable optimism of the Peggy I know and love."

She managed to put on a smile. "Oh, I don't know. I'm tired, I suppose. It's been a long day."

He gazed at her for a minute, then stood up and reached for his crutch, holding out his other hand. "Let's take a walk."

They left the ranch house quietly. The side door to the kitchen stood open, and Peggy could hear friendly chatter and a radio playing inside, as Jarvis and Ana settled into their new, hopefully temporary, home. Daniel's hand was warm in hers.

Together they strolled along the edge of the split-log fence bordering the property in the dry, pleasant warmth of what passed for late winter or early spring here. It was very quiet. The only sound out in the field was the whisper of the wind through the mesquite and rocks ... well, that and the various moans and bleats of Howard's menagerie, who couldn't be left alone at the estate and were currently penned in a shady corral near the ranch house.

They paused at the top of a bluff looking down on a dry creekbed. The sky was pale blue, the distant hills and mountains watercolor shades of purple and muted orange. It was desolate and beautiful, and utterly unlike England or New York or the landscapes of the European continent.

She'd been so many places, done so many things, lost and gained so much.

Sudden feeling overwhelmed her, and Peggy turned to throw her arms around Daniel, burying her face in his neck. Startled at first, he slipped his hand out of the crutch's arm loop and held her, in the dry desert wind as the grasses rattled around them.

"You okay?" he asked quietly when she pulled back at last, dry-eyed but feeling drained anyway.

Peggy nodded. 

Daniel lightly twined one of her curls between his fingers; the wind was tugging her hair every which way. "You're such a picture out here, you know, Peg, with the desert behind you. Looks like you should be on a photo shoot."

"I'm sure the current state of my hair and wardrobe would give any self-respecting photographer fits."

"Hey, if they don't want the photos, I'll take 'em."

He wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her in for a kiss.

It started soft and sweet, lightly sampling each other's lips, but the heat between them grew until his hands were tangled in her windblown hair and the crutch had fallen at their feet. When they finally broke apart, they were both flushed and breathless.

"Wow," Daniel murmured. His arm was still tight around her waist, snugging her against his body.

"You know," Peggy said, running her hands up his sides and feeling the firm muscles flex under his shirt as he shifted his balance to compensate for the fallen crutch, "I don't think anyone can see us from the house ..."

"I like the way you think." He hooked a finger under the top button of her blouse.

Cushioned from the hard, stony ground by Daniel's jacket and Peggy's skirt, they made love behind an outcropping of rocks, under the clear noon sky. Afterwards the wind dried the sweat on their bodies as they lay curled together.

"The thought occurs to me," Daniel said, tracing idle patterns on her bare skin, "that it won't be too long until Jack's recovered enough for ... you know. This. If he's interested."

Peggy laughed. "I think if you _don't_ think he's interested, you need to have your eyes checked." She rolled over and sat up before Daniel could allow himself to be drawn into another round of second-guessing himself. "In the meantime, I suppose it won't do to sunburn in awkward places. Where are my knickers?"

"I don't see 'em, but I think I've got sand in places I don't want sand."

They dressed, with a certain amount of giggling and brushing sand off each other, and Peggy tried to use her fingers to comb her hair back into some semblance of order that made it look less like she'd been making love in a pasture. She had a feeling it wasn't very successful, especially from the way Daniel was grinning at her.

They walked slowly back to the ranch house, hand in hand. The lowering sun was not quite so hot on her bare head as it had been, and the world was quiet and peaceful, in a way the busy city never was.

It wouldn't be a bad thing, Peggy thought, if they had to stay out here for awhile. Jack could recuperate, while they planned their attack on the Council together. Meanwhile, there would be time for walks in the desert, time for quiet dinners with Jarvis's excellent cooking, and slow lovemaking afterward ... preferably somewhere with a little less sand ...

"I see you're smiling now." Daniel squeezed her hand.

"Thinking about the future."

"Ah, _there's_ that unreasonable optimism. I missed it." But he was smiling too, and she thought she wasn't the only one thinking about possibilities.

 _We'll be all right,_ she thought. _All of us._


	7. Chapter 7

Daniel and Peggy seemed to be enjoying their enforced ranch vacation, which Jack thought was all well and good for _them,_ but by the middle of the following day, he found himself hot, sticky, thirsty, miserable, and bored. The real heat of summer hadn't set in yet -- he could only imagine that the ranch, which lacked any sort of air conditioning, would be utter Hell by July -- but it was hot enough to make him sweat, aggravating the itching of the bandages and worsening a crawling restlessness under his skin. He wasn't sure if that had to do with the morphine, with the knowledge that his colleagues had tried to kill him (in fairness, he _had_ betrayed them first) or with his inability to concentrate long enough to actually _do_ anything about it. He was too tired and weak to sit up and read, but not weak enough to just sleep through it; his body seemed to have decided that it had slept enough lately, and while he was too exhausted to move, he didn't seem to be exhausted enough to actually _rest._

He ended up lying in a sweaty heap on the bed, staring at the wall and snapping at anyone who came in, which eventually succeeded in getting everyone to leave him alone.

Except for Peggy. Of course.

"I brought you some fresh water," she reported, whipping away the half-empty glass of lukewarm water and replacing it with another.

"Oh good," Jack muttered, staring at a crack in the wall. The water on the ranch tasted heavily of minerals, and the warmer it got, the worse it got.

Also, the more he drank, the more often he had to get up to pee, and getting up was even worse than lying still. He spent a self-indulgent and (he had to admit) self-pitying moment wishing Blackwell had better aim. At least he wouldn't be having to put up with all of this.

The bed dipped under Peggy's weight as she sat down beside him. Jack clenched his teeth in anticipation of some British platitude about stiff upper lips, or a Peggyish barb about lying around feeling sorry for himself. Instead, her hand settled on his arm.

"I was shot in the shoulder once, you know," she said. "It wasn't the same as this, but the thing I remember most, besides the boredom of recovery, was how much of a mess I felt after two days in bed. It's a funny thing, a person who's up and about can easily go for a few days without a bath and not feel too dreadful about it; I suppose we all learned that during the war. But a day or two in sickbed and one starts to feel absolutely disgusting."

"So you're saying I stink," Jack said after a moment, but he couldn't keep a note of deprecating humor out of his voice.

Her fingers were cool on his overheated skin, rubbing up and down his arm. "No, I'm saying I think you'd feel a lot better if you were clean, especially in this warm weather. I don't think it's a good idea for you to take a bath yet, with your bandages, but I could bring in some water so you can wash your hair."

He wanted to argue about it; he was in that kind of mood. But his scalp itched and his skin itched and the idea of washing away some of that feeling was too strong a siren call to risk losing by being enough of a bastard to chase her away. "That'd be all right, I guess," he said.

Peggy squeezed his arm and rose from the bed. Jack lay in a self-pitying heap for awhile longer and listened to her footsteps tripping in and out (she appreciated having a mission, he suspected, even if it was only arranging bath things) before he steeled himself and sat up. Peggy had been busy; she'd pulled two chairs close together and had a large bowl of water on the seat of one, and a pitcher and stack of towels on the other.

"I think the easiest thing would be to have you sit on the floor and lean your head backwards," Peggy suggested. Suiting action to words, she folded a blanket and laid it in front of the chair on the new-looking wooden floorboards. "Bending forward might be too much of a strain on the stitches in your back."

Jack's only reply was a grunt. Sitting up was already making him dizzy; the heat made it worse. Peggy was probably right that he wasn't drinking enough water, but right now just moving seemed like more effort than it was worth. His hands rested in his lap like lead weights at the end of his arms.

"Come on," Peggy urged, tugging at him. Jack allowed himself to be manhandled out of bed and helped down to the floor, at which point he realized that she meant _she_ was going to wash his hair and stiffened up.

"Oh, don't have a fit," Peggy remarked with stifled laughter in her voice. She folded a towel over his shoulders, covering the heavy, restrictive mass of bandages on his upper back. When he moved, he could feel them tugging at him.

"I don't know if I can lean back any more than I can lean forward," he admitted. He'd thought he was past the point of embarrassment with everything that had happened to him lately, but sitting on the floor in his undershirt and boxers, sweaty and weak, he discovered that there were depths of humiliation yet to plumb.

"I won't let you fall," Peggy promised, and the worst part was, he believed her. She sat on the second chair, next to the one with the basin of water, and draped another folded towel over the seat for him to lean against. Both chairs were jammed against the wall, so there wasn't much chance of tipping, but it took an effort of willpower to lean back, tipping his head carefully into Peggy's sure hands.

She cupped a hand under his skull and picked up the pitcher with the other. Jack flinched violently (and painfully) when the first stream of cool water cascaded over his scalp. He'd expected it to be warmer. Also, the water had a slight scent, something sweet and floral. "I'm going to smell like my grandmother's bedroom after this," he complained.

"Close your eyes," Peggy told him in an amused tone. "You'll get water in them."

Jack gave a long-suffering sigh and shut his eyes.

Without visual input, and soon with water clogging his ears, he was left in a world composed mainly of touch and smell. The lukewarm water felt impossibly good, soothing away the sticky heat and the unpleasantness left behind by two days of sweating in a sickbed. Peggy alternated pouring water and massaging her fingers against his wet scalp. She rubbed in slow circles, easing tension he hadn't even realized was there.

By the time she gave his hair a final rinse, he'd relaxed into it completely. Even the growing ache in his back -- the position wasn't particularly good for either the healing bullet wound or for his spine -- wasn't enough to rouse him from a lethargic pleasure coma.

Peggy blotted his hair with a towel. He'd wilted sideways and was leaning against her leg. His eyes were still shut; he tensed again, a little, when a wet cloth touched his face and smoothed across his damp forehead and cheeks.

Her ministrations with the cloth moved down, eventually, to his neck, and he mustered the energy to crack his eyes open. "Sponge bath?"

"I think you'll feel much better if you are clean."

"Yes," he said fervently. "I can do it, though." He reached up, fumbling around in an attempt to take the cloth away from her. They ended up in a brief tug of war, which she of course won.

"I know you can," she said, and smiled with a gleam in her eye, dropping her gaze appreciatively to his shoulders. "But I want to. Let's get your shirt off."

They were between the bed and the wall, and the room wasn't very large, so it was easy enough for Jack to slide over to the bed without getting up. He leaned on the bed while Peggy helped him peel his shirt off, and then he rested his head on his folded arms while she stripped off the itching bandages. 

"I'm going to bring some clean water, all right?"

He grunted acknowledgement, and relaxed against the bed while she crossed the floor; the door opened and closed. The heat no longer seemed so oppressive; actually, with his hair damp and cool, he was almost comfortable. The deep ache between his shoulder blades was still there, though, even muffled by the narcotics, like a kink he couldn't quite stretch out.

The door opened and Peggy came in, and hers weren't the only set of footsteps. Jack jerked upright before he realized who the other person was from the crutch tap.

Daniel grinned at him and sat down on the bed, while Peggy knelt behind him with a bowl of clean water and a washcloth.

"I understand Peggy's got you acting almost human," Daniel said, scruffing his fingers through Jack's wet hair.

Jack decided he was too relaxed to bother coming up with a sarcastic retort. Besides, Peggy was washing his back and it felt too good to want to break the moment. "Where'd you get off to?" he asked instead.

"Went to town with Jarvis." Daniel stretched out on the bed, though he kept his hand on Jack's head. "Jarvis wanted to pick up, as he put it, 'a few small items, without which a civilized existence is impossible.'" His rendition of Jarvis's tones and accent was accurate enough to make Jack smile against his arm, and Peggy gave a muffled snort. "Which apparently translates to an hours-long shopping spree, while I did some snooping around to find out how things are going with our friends at the Arena Club."

Thoughts of Vernon and the SSR rose in Jack's mind like nausea in his throat; he tried to push them back. "I saw the paper," he said, trying for flippant. "Apparently I'm dead. What'd you two do to my car?"

"Nothing worse than you already did to it when you drove it into Howard's privet hedge," Peggy said behind him. She was working on his shoulders now, applying the cool, damp cloth as well as massaging the muscles with her strong hands. He didn't want to admit how good it felt, easing out the soreness from days of inactivity.

Still, he managed to rally enough to say, "Nothing worse? If the paper can be believed, you set it on fire!"

Daniel gave his hair a gentle tug. "The point is keeping you alive."

The frustrating thing was, they were right. He knew how long the reach of the Council could be, and if Vernon and everyone else thought he was dead, they wouldn't be looking for him. It was the only way to keep all of them safe. But he didn't have to like it.

"Do you two have a long-term plan, beyond hiding in the middle of nowhere until they forget about us?"

"The plan's about the same as it ever was," Daniel said. "We're going to drop a PR bomb on the Council. They'll be too busy scrambling to fight off lawsuits and criminal charges to worry about us for awhile."

"Just in case, though, we'd already planned to lie low for awhile." Peggy's lips brushed across the back of his neck. "This doesn't change things a great deal. We simply have more reason than we did before to spend some time avoiding our usual locales."

"In all seriousness, Jack, we really couldn't have done any of this without you on the inside," Daniel said. "We might never have managed to get dirt on some of these bastards."

"You'd have found a way. Probably ludicrously dangerous and ill-advised, based on past experience."

Rebandaged and changed into a clean undershirt, Jack drowsed through the afternoon, stretched out on the bed. He woke to find that the hard white sunlight shafting through the window had turned soft and gold on the wall. When he'd fallen asleep, Daniel had been lying with him, playing casually with his hair -- Peggy had taken the soiled dressings off somewhere and hadn't come back -- but now he was alone on the rumpled bed. Voices drifted in from outside through the partly open window. He heard Peggy's laugh, and the silvery tinkle of another woman's laughter, who he guessed was Ana Jarvis, followed by the low cadence of Daniel's voice.

There was a glass of water beside the bed. He drank half of it, wincing at the taste, and took a morphine tablet. A short investigation of the bedroom uncovered clean men's clothes in the bureau in the corner; he guessed the slacks and shirts had been either borrowed from Jarvis, or bought _by_ Jarvis, either of which was a weird thought, but they fit him well enough. He was able to dress himself without needing help as long as he took it slowly, waiting out dizzy spells by leaning on the corner of the bureau.

He left the bedroom and ventured out into the main part of the house. There were boxes of fat manilla envelopes on the floor, and Jack paused to glance through a few of them, finding ones addressed to various law enforcement agencies, newspapers, radio stations ... Apparently Peggy and Daniel were serious about this PR bomb idea of theirs.

Eventually he followed the sound of voices out to a veranda on the shady side of the house. All four of them were out here, sipping drinks and chatting as the day faded into evening.

"You're awake!" Ana Jarvis was the first to scramble to her feet; she dragged a chair over for him. Peggy and Daniel were holding hands, but Peggy reached out to brush her hand across his arm.

Jack wasn't entirely sure how to reciprocate. He didn't know what the Jarvises were supposed to know about his relationship with Peggy and Daniel; hell, _he_ wasn't completely sure what his relationship with Peggy and Daniel actually was. On the other hand, the three of them seemed to be sharing a bedroom (or bedrooms, rather; none of the beds were big enough for three people, so it was more of a rota -- Peggy last night, Daniel this afternoon) and it wasn't like the ranch was big enough for word not to get around.

"Are you hungry?" Peggy asked him.

"I could eat." It surprised him to discover he wasn't just hungry, but ravenous. 

They ate outside, devouring an incongruously gourmet meal spread out on a "rustic" plank table. Jack decided not to ask if they'd been waiting for him to wake up, since everything was ready except for a quick salad that Ana tossed together. The thought was a strange one, warm and unfamiliar in equal parts.

It was the first time he had a chance to talk with either Jarvis or the man's wife, but it was less awkward than he'd been expecting. Jarvis was polite, although wary, and Ana was openly friendly, even though Jack knew a blood-covered stranger couldn't have made the best first impression.

After dinner, Jarvis lit lanterns and they stayed outside in the long blue dusk. Peggy brought a thick blanket from inside and spread it on the decking. Jack was both annoyed and skeptical about this, but relented and lay down, mollified somewhat when Peggy and Daniel abandoned their chairs to sit with him. Out in the darkness somewhere, a coyote yapped and howled. The conversation washed over him; he wasn't really paying attention.

Maybe it wouldn't be too terrible spending a few days or even a few weeks out here, he thought drowsily. He wasn't a person who took vacations ... at least, he never had been before. There was always something more important to be done. You didn't climb the social ladder by sleeping on the job.

But now that life lay in flaming wreckage behind him. The thought was more strange than painful. He supposed that grief about everything he'd lost would probably set in eventually, but right now he couldn't find anything to miss: an empty house in a city where he never wanted to live in the first place, a job that had turned out to be more about doing other people's dirty work than serving law and order ...

Maybe having a little time to think about what he wanted to do next wasn't such a bad thing, after all.

He slitted his eyes open, watching Peggy and Daniel in the warm glow of the lanterns, both of them beautiful and unselfconscious. Although he wasn't included in their conversation at the moment, he didn't feel left out. He was content just to lie here and watch them.

They could use someone to watch their backs, he thought sleepily. Based on what he'd seen, a guy who was handy with a gun and had professional contacts in high places might be useful in their world.

He couldn't believe he was actually considering this.

But ... why not? What else did he have to do with his life? Peggy and Daniel were making a real difference in the world. When it came right down to it, he'd always thought of himself the hero type -- or at least he'd hoped he was. He'd thought the war would give him a chance to prove it, and instead it had done the opposite; and then he'd thought the SSR would be his redemption, but that hadn't worked out as he'd planned either.

Maybe this was his real second chance ... his opportunity to do better. To _be_ better.

He wasn't sure if he was entirely ready to pitch the idea to them. What if they said no? _Still, look at the competition,_ he thought. They were using mobsters for backup. Working with him had to be an improvement over that.

Peggy glanced his way, and Jack hastily closed his eyes. Nothing changed in the cadence of her conversation with Daniel, but she moved a little closer to him, and her hand found his in the lamplit dark.

 

**~The Beginning~**


End file.
